Robyn Mineko Williams is setting her latest dance in a bar, with a rocker and a puppetmaster

Robyn Mineko Williams began her dance career with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in 2000, fulfilling a childhood dream. “I saw Hubbard Street when I was 9 and decided, ‘That’s what I want to do, somehow,’” she said.

Her tenure with the company ended in 2012. Afterward, she started saying yes to more opportunities to make dances, transitioning her dream job toward choreographer-slash-performer. In 2014, she added mother to her list of roles.

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“Traveling around doing choreographic commissions is really great, but it also can be a bit lonely,” said Williams, who is in her 40s.

In the hope of creating more on her own terms and therefore more at home with her son, she began a sequence of longer-development works that incorporate music, film and other media, with the help of aesthetically sympathetic friends. Her latest, “To Leave You,” premieres Nov. 9 and 10 at Three Top Lounge at the Salt Shed.

It’s difficult to summarize Williams’ role in the creation of “To Leave You” and its kin with a one-word job title such as “choreographer.” In assembling artists of several stripes and guiding their creativity with her prompts, she could be called a director, engineer or even a conductor. The finished pieces are grounded in dance, but the dance blurs into the music and visuals, and the pieces respond to the settings where they are performed.

Making more than just dance and creating with others marks a distinct phase of her artistic career. “I think it’s the only way I’ve been able to evolve myself,” she said.

The tinder of “To Leave You” was Williams’ meditations on mortality. She considered what she would like to leave her now 11-year-old son, Knox, to remember, as if placing messages and memories in a box of keepsakes. For example, Williams’ grandmother taught her about knife technique, in a way that acknowledged their Japanese ancestry and showed a glimmer of individuality.

“She always told me to cut cucumbers on a diagonal,” Williams said, “and that’s [a memory] that would go in the box.”

Courtesy of Ricardo E. Adame

She assembled a group of artists she wanted to create with: the dancers Jessica Tong and Jason Hortin, her former companymates from Hubbard Street; the musician Nate Kinsella, of the band American Football; and Julia Miller, one of the founders of the puppet-forward performance collective Manual Cinema.

Through artist residencies at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and at DESERTRADE in Twentynine Palms, California, the fivesome workshopped ideas for the piece, everyone bringing not only artistic skills but also personal histories, along with cherished mementos and family photographs. As the artists fueled the piece, it took shape and grew to encompass all of them in its world.

“Everyone is in the world together, and we’re all making this thing together,” Williams said. “So there wasn’t a separation between musician and visual artist and dancer. How do we do each of our things that we’re so well versed in, but find a seamless way to interact so you don’t feel that definition or line between the mediums?”

This loosening of the lines means everyone is participating in the dance in “To Leave You,” including Miller and Kinsella, whose performance lives do not normally involve dance.

Miller said her training was at least dance-adjacent, coming from the more visual subgenres of theater. “Mostly theater that’s really physical,” she said, “like clown or commedia, and I brought that training into Manual Cinema.”

How her physical participation in “To Leave You” came about sounds like a case of being careful what you ask for. “I was like, ‘If you wanted me to move a little bit . . .,’” Miller said. “And then she put me in the show, which was really exciting and scary.”

Kinsella, too. “I will be moving around, or whatever you want to call it, in the piece,” Kinsella said. He worked previously with Williams on a music video for the song “Red Meadow” where he created the movements. “I guess it was technically dancing that I had put together for the two of us to do,” he said. She was impressed, and pointed to that experience when he initially balked at dancing in “To Leave You.”

“She said, ‘Actually, you are a dancer — you just don’t think of yourself that way,” he said.

And conversely, Kinsella cited an element that made it into the show where the others play the piano as if trying to remember a piece they learned in childhood. As the dance involves the non-dancers, the music involves the non-musicians — at least to the extent the prefix “non-” applies to anyone in this piece.

“It was really a very welcoming room to be in,” Miller said.

Barry Brecheisen/For the Sun-Times

Williams often finds nontraditional dance venues, entertaining even a Chinese restaurant for “To Leave You.” She landed on Three Top Lounge at the Salt Shed, responding to some alchemy of the decor, the views and the openness. "There was just something that I was like, 'Oh, this is the place,'" she said.

In developing “To Leave You,” Williams and the other artists followed paths that presented themselves to them. Similarly, “To Leave You” itself was a path that appeared after Williams’ two most recent pieces. “Echo Mine” was inspired by the dancer Claire Bataille, who became ill and passed away before the piece premiered. Then “Hisako’s House” explored the legacy Williams’ grandmother left her, and was performed on-site in her grandmother’s house in Lombard. Hisako, too, died before the premiere. The meditations on mortality that arose from those two artistically entwined deaths sparked “To Leave You.”

At the lounge inside the Salt Shed, the audience will move around as the performance unfolds, promenade-style. “Like stepping into the world from the get-go, with us,” Williams said. Another boundary made permeable. Who knows what future works will emerge from the embers of this one?