Darling "Shear" Squire

Darling is a Chicago native who has roots in Atlanta where Darling started dance training. Darling attended North Springs Charter School of the Performing Arts where Darling was trained in ballet, modern, jazz, and African performance. Darling began dancing professionally out of high school and in that time worked with many great choreographers. The highlights were working with Bubba Carr, choreographer/artistic director to Cher for 12 years and counting; Rhonda Henriksen, soloist with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago; Twyla Tharp and Tracy Vogt, former Philadanco dancer and soloist; Hinton Battle, the original Scarecrow from the Broadway production of The Wiz; and Lauri Stallings, former Hubbard Street and River North Dance Chicago soloist and founder/artistic director of gloATL.

Darling moved back to Chicago in 2011 to start Suna Dance, a collaborative artist group, and had the first performance in November of 2011. In 2017 Darling was a recipient of the 3Arts Make a Wave grant followed by being a nominee for the 3Arts Awards in 2019. Darling also was a recipient of the Between Gestures scholarship from the Goethe-Institute to attend the Impulstanz festival in Vienna, Austria in 2019. Darling was a 2019 recipient of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) Lab Artist Award for research and artist development.

 As a freelance dancer/choreographer in Chicago, Darling has worked with 2020 (CDF) awardee Erin Kilmurray, The Fly Honeys of The Inconvenience, Body Cartography of Minneapolis, Ayako Kato, Links Hall, Victoria Bradford, Chicago AIDS Foundation, Chances Dances, no small plan productions, Slo’Mo, the Public Hotel, Soho House Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Growing Power Inc., EXPO Chicago, Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Diana Quinones Rivera, University of Chicago, Jamila Woods, Alexa Græ, University of Illinois at Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Sex Matters, Chicago Film Archive, Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, Salonathon, and Open TV beta.