Photo: John W Sisson, Jr.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

After twenty years collaborating in the internationally renowned performance ensemble Goat Island, one might expect the company’s co-founders Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish to take a break; perhaps a nice, long vacation. On the contrary—just as Goat Island was embarking on the tour of its final performance, “The Lastmaker,” Hixson and Goulish were birthing a new company, incorporated in the fall of 2008. “Matthew and I wanted to continue our creative practice of making performances and all the activities that surround this process (writing, drawing, filmmaking, symposiums, teaching) after Goat Island,” explains Hixson. “We wanted…[to work] on a project-by-project basis to minimize the commitment artists would need to make to our company; collaborating with international artists as well as working locally; and supporting younger artists.” Thus was born Every house has a door—inspired, energetic and incredibly ambitious. The company embarked on its practice by creating not one, but three new works, developed in tandem over two years and across the globe; in Rio de Janeiro, in Croatia, and here in the couple’s hometown of Chicago. One of these pieces, “Let us think of these things always, let us speak of them never,” is a “theatrical quartet” starring Goulish, Stephen Fiehn of Chicago-based performance duo Cupola Bobber, and two collaborators from Zagreb, Croatia—actor Mislav Cavajda and dancer/choreographer Selma Banich—debuting in Chicago this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Mayumi Lake and Lauren Deutsch

Watching a thunderous, highly choreographed taiko performance, you might be inclined to think you are witnessing an ancient Japanese rite, an homage to emperors and Shinto goddesses passed down from masters through wide-eyed generations, like karate or sushi making. In truth, taiko performance—at least the way Americans most often see it played, as an ensemble—is a post-World War II art form, developed by a jazz musician who helped disseminate it around the globe during his lifetime. Ensemble taiko is less an expression of ancient ritual than a thriving, evolving percussive art birthed at the outset of the Japanese diaspora.

The MCA Stage is an appropriate home then for a taiko spectacular smattered with improvisatory jazz, Japanese lute, Korean vocal performance and traditional kimono dance. Chicago-based JASC Tsukasa Taiko (funded by the Japanese American Service Committee of Chicago) gathers artists, including youth ensembles, from San Francisco, New York and Tokyo to put on the largest show of this kind each year at the MCA—an adrenaline-charged departure from the customary sugar-laced holiday fare. It’s refreshing to see kids in kimonos hammering tribal rhythms from massive drums with the grace of martial artists; you’re more inclined to respectfully bow to them after the show than coo at their adorableness. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

For those who remember the short-lived but never-to-be-forgotten Asylum Experience in Berwyn in the late 1990s, it was a haunted house unlike any other that was steeped not in shock and gore, but in imagination and creepiness. The lines would run around the block at this time of year, surrounding the Victorian tower with a hearse in front of it as the lucky elite who were ushered in were slowly treated to disturbing and eye-popping scenes from room to room that were exquisite in their macabre detail, courtesy of Dave Link.

Link is a sculpture and design professional who creates movie-themed designs for companies such as Lucas Films, Disney, Sony Pictures, Sega and the like, and has an uncanny knack for creating lifelike characters and creatures which are then brought to life in animated vignettes and combined with live actors who are specialists in contortion, mime, performance art, minimalist deadpan dialogue and creepy improvisation that never breaks character. Read the rest of this entry »

Toby Gough

Director Toby Gough’s global cachet is considerable; he has brought Cuban musical productions to Edinburgh Fringe, where his work “Children of the Sea”—theater projects and music workshops for victims of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia—won the festival’s first prize. Gough has produced “Julius Caesar” in Africa and is currently running a show about Brazilian music. But “The Merchants of Bollywood,” billed as the first authentic Indian music and dance spectacular out of Bombay for the stage, which opens at the Auditorium Theatre this week, is the first time Gough has adapted from a filmic tradition.

We corresponded with Gough over email from Singapore the week before the show opens.

You’ve done a number of theatrical productions involving cultures from all over the world, but none seem to have used as specific a generic performance tradition as Bollywood. Did you stay close to Bollywood conventions for this piece? The plot seems to be fairly faithful to Bollywood stories.

Yes, the idea was to take a real life story and put it through the Bollywood mega mixer….

It’s an impossible fantasy, a perfect dream. The experience for the audience is to see a Bollywood film plot unfold before their eyes, in front of the camera, and then we show all the real-life chaos of what making movies in Bollywood is really like. The tiny budgets, the the impossible schedules, the formulaic scripts, the shoots in mountains, the tantrums of the divas and the relentless plagiarizing of Hollywood films to fulfill the demand of the billions of Indians who love what is known as Bollywood Masala! Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker

The MCA’s new Global Stage series, part of a remarkably strong lineup of performance at the museum’s theater this year, begins with Vienna-and-Paris-based company Superamas’ show “EMPIRE (Art & Politics),” a postmodern performance using theater, dance and recorded film that combines a re-enactment of a Napoleonic battle, a film-release party in New York and a fictional documentary about Afghanistan. We spoke with founding company member Philippe Riera about metatheater, hybrid performance and history.

Do you think that hybrid theater offers more room for creating messages about the current state of the world? Do we need to be making theater now that is somehow about the digitization and viral spread of meaning in the world now?

The good thing about a stage performance is that you really play with the authentic real people here on stage, before your eyes, and the fake—the action is more a representation of things in a given context. In the case of “EMPIRE,” some spectators really believed we went to Afghanistan to interview Samira Makhmalbaf… So we decided to change the editing of the documentary film to make sure people wouldn’t think we are duplicating capitalistic strategies usually used to abuse people’s naivete. A hybrid art form forces the viewers to wonder about what they see… and what it may mean… This is something we do to activate the spectators’ gaze. It is for us a real strategy to resist against myths and legends, no matter how beautiful they may be…. A strategy of joyful deconstruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Nikki Johnson

Jeremy Bloom is singing the body electric—(almost) literally. The Northwestern alum and Drama League Directing Fellow has gathered more than twenty intrepid performers to “rhythmically chant” Walt Whitman’s greatest hits in the buff this Friday onstage at Links Hall in the Chicago premiere of “Leaves of Grass.”

A fan since high school, Bloom was inspired to put the granddaddy of American free verse onstage when he realized that Whitman’s ultra-famous “Song of Myself” “is a series of instructions to the reader.” “He commands: ‘Undrape: you are not guilty to me,’ and ‘The man’s body is sacred, the woman’s body is sacred,’” and so, Bloom explains, “it became clear that some sort of scene in a play of these poems would have to be a celebratory naked celebration.” Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a brilliant sort of “Eureka!” moment revealed early in the staging of “The Astronaut’s Birthday,” Redmoon’s spectacle produced in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, and that is the realization that the array of symmetrical windows composing the facade of the museum’s Josef Paul Kleihues building make a perfect set of panels for a comic book. Once witnessed, you’ll be unlikely to ever look at the MCA without picturing some graphic narrative unfolding within its panes. Created and directed by Redmoon artistic director Frank Maugeri, with a co-creation credit to the company’s co-founder, Jim Lasko, “The Astronaut’s Birthday” is a compelling story, with nice artwork from Donovan Foote and others that pays homage at times to the likes of Jack Kirby (although it retains a circa-seventies superheroes-generic style most of the time) and that purports to draw from the Golden Age of comics and the 1950s sci-fi movies in telling the tale of an innocent bystander drawn, along with his family, into events of cosmic significance. Comic-book nerds like me are more likely to suss out references to the Silver Age from the sixties and seventies, especially in the plot structure and “lessons” learned by the characters. Nevertheless, the whole thing works pretty well as advertised, with some especially nice visual moments when all the panels are brought together to create a single dramatic image. Read the rest of this entry »

Next week Redmoon Theater will unveil their latest collaboration with MCA Stage, “The Astronaut’s Birthday,” a performance about an astronaut’s journey home to earth that will turn the MCA’s front façade into comic-book- and 1950s-sci-fi-inspired frames that incorporate hand-illustrated shadow puppets, live actors and projections. We spoke with Redmoon Artistic Director Frank Maugeri about retro technology and the challenges of the MCA space.

In this piece you make use of a lot of handmade, almost primitive technology—what will the performance look like?

We use close to 700 hand-drawn hand-inked hand-gelled images that will be projected along the entire façade of the MCA. The piece has remarkable colorful generosity to it, though it’s based on the four-color system of Marvel Comics. We chose this simple palette because the press in 1960s comics, one of our major inspirations, only worked with rudimentary colors, and we also play with what feel like press-making mistakes, with washed-out colors at moments. Read the rest of this entry »

Members of 2nd Story (John Wilson, Kim Morris, and Doug Whippo)

RECOMMENDED

Lifeline Theatre and Live Bait Theater offer a smorgasbord of storytelling experiences by presenting the fourteenth-annual Fillet of Solo Festival. Fans of the solo performance medium should have no problem finding something to enjoy at the festival, which performs at a variety of locations in Chicago over the next few weeks.

Last weekend’s offerings included performances by three members of 2nd Story recited stories that, though otherwise disconnected, were told in an interwoven fashion that echoed one another in parts. Following 2nd Story, the storytelling collective Sweat Girls delivered five monologues, under the title “The Sweat Girls are A-Gaga!,” that touched on late motherhood, first-time home-buying and seeing your child off to college, among other topics.

If these performances were any indication, the Fillet of Solo Festival shouldn’t disappoint. The festival has programmed such a wide variety of performers, the only caveat is that even a little research into who is playing on a given night will go a long way. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

The Fillet of Solo Festival (Lifeline Theatre and Live Bait Theater) at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood and The Artistic Home, 3914 North Clark, (773)761-4477. Through August 21.

RECOMMENDED

Since 2001, artistic director Pete Guither has been projecting images onto naked performers as part of “The Living Canvas.” “Demons,” their seventh show in Chicago, delves into the mind of a troubled young woman as she transports her sister into the fantastical world she lives in: a world filled with faeries, phantasms and playful creatures. These creatures are boldly portrayed by eight other unclad actors of varying shapes and sizes who are constantly in motion: scrambling up the scaffolding of the set, executing elaborate movement routines, or creating a living wall of art. The psychedelic color displays projected onto the actors and the set coupled with Isaac Mandel’s invigorating sound design exquisitely highlight the simple beauty of the piece. For anyone feeling particularly affected by the summer heat, Guither has a solution for you: take those restrictive clothes off. Seriously. There is a full number designed for audience participation at the end of every show. From the packed house on the night I saw it, and the amount of willing audience participation, “The Living Canvas” is highly regarded not only as a visually striking performance, but as an exciting, interactive experience. (Zach Freeman)

The Living Canvas at National Pastime Theater, 4139 N. Broadway, (773)327-7077, through August 14. $20.