Chicago choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams will stage “To Leave You” at Three Top Lounge at the Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston Ave., on Nov. 9 and 10. The performance brings together dance, music and visual art, with the audience moving around as the action unfolds.
The Lounge’s Place in the Salt Shed
The Salt Shed says it opened in 2022 in the former Morton Salt complex, which had been a Chicago fixture for nearly 100 years. The venue describes Three Top Lounge as a cocktail bar at the building’s highest point, with panoramic skyline views, according to its history and venue description.
That promenade-style format means viewers will not sit still for the show's roughly 50 minutes. According to the Robyn Mineko Williams official website, “To Leave You” invites audiences to change their viewing perspectives and follow the action as it unfolds. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Williams said audiences will step into the world of the performance from the very beginning, with the venue itself shaping the experience; the Sun-Times notes Williams was drawn to Three Top Lounge by what she described as some alchemy of the decor, the views and the openness.
The Sun-Times describes the Nov. 9 and 10 Salt Shed dates as the piece's premiere. Williams's official website says “To Leave You” was commissioned by and premiered at MCA Chicago in September 2025 for its Chicago Performs festival, while See Chicago Dance described the Sept. 18 and 19 presentation in the MCA's Edlis Neeson Theater as an early preview. The sources use different descriptions for the MCA and Salt Shed presentations, and the available accounts do not reconcile them.
A Cast Built From Old Collaborators and New Collisions
The show brings together dance artists Jessica Tong and Jason Hortin, both former companymates of Williams at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, alongside musician-composer Nate Kinsella and visual artist Julia Miller, per the artist's official website. Kinsella, known for his work in the bands Birthmark and American Football, told the Sun-Times he will be moving around, or whatever you want to call it, in the piece — a role that builds on earlier work he did creating movement for Williams's “Red Meadow” music video.
Miller, a founder of the puppet-forward performance collective Manual Cinema, also appears in the performance alongside Kinsella. The Sun-Times reports Miller said her theater training was mostly physical theater, including clown and commedia, and that being put in the show felt exciting and scary. She also described the creative environment around the piece as welcoming, according to the same report.
One moment in the show finds performers playing piano as if recalling a piece learned in childhood, the station's report notes — a detail that fits the work's broader interest in memory. “To Leave You” combines dance, music and visuals and responds directly to the settings where it is staged, according to the seed reporting.
From a Childhood Dream to a Meditation on What Gets Left Behind
Williams, who is in her 40s, began her dance career with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in 2000 and stayed with the company until 2012, according to the Sun-Times. She has said she saw the company perform at age 9 and decided then that she wanted to dance there, fulfilling what the station described as a childhood dream. After becoming a mother in 2014, Williams began taking on more opportunities to make her own dances, describing choreographic commissions as great but sometimes lonely, and developing longer works that incorporate music, film and other media so she could work on her own terms and be closer to home with her son.
“To Leave You” was inspired by Williams's meditations on mortality and on what she would want her 11-year-old son, Knox, to remember of her, per the Sun-Times report. She has recalled her grandmother teaching her knife technique, including advice to cut cucumbers diagonally — a small, domestic memory woven into a work about legacy.
In the Chicago Tribune, Williams said “To Leave You” is more a continuation of her desire to interrogate her own personal histories, reflecting forward and back. The Chicago Tribune also noted that the MCA Chicago event listing describes the piece as a cinematic performance exploring the impressions people leave on and for one another, with live performance functioning as a kind of archive of personal memory.
Echoes of Earlier Work in Bars, Taverns and a Grandmother's House
This is not the first time Williams has taken dance outside conventional theaters. Her earlier work “Undercover Episodes” played out as a pub-crawl of dance presented in bars and taverns around Chicago, the Tribune reported in its 2019 review of her piece “Echo Mine.” That work was inspired by former Hubbard Street dancer Claire Bataille, who became ill and died before “Echo Mine” premiered; the Tribune reported it was originally intended as a solo for Bataille before premiering at the Harris Theater as a trio.
Williams also created “Hisako's House,” performed on-site in the Lombard home her grandparents built in the 1950s, exploring the legacy her grandmother left her after she died before the piece premiered, according to the Chicago Reader. Both “Echo Mine” and “Hisako's House” fed into the mortality themes running through “To Leave You,” per the Sun-Times account.
Before arriving at the Salt Shed, “To Leave You” was workshopped at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and at DESERTRADE in Twentynine Palms, California, according to the Sun-Times. The Momentary's own event description characterizes the piece as seamlessly blending movement, music, film and projection — a hybrid approach that has defined Williams's work as she builds a dance meant to move, literally and emotionally, through the room it's performed in.
