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 »

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.

RECOMMENDED

The story goes that songwriter Harold Arlen hailed a Manhattan taxi one rainy day only to have the cab driver serenade him with “Stormy Weather.” “Do you know who wrote that?” Arlen inquired. “Sure, Irving Berlin,” answered the driver. “Try again.” “Richard Rodgers.” “Nope.” “Cole Porter?” “Actually, I wrote it.” “Who are you?” asked the skeptical driver. “Harold Arlen.” “Harold who?” Despite having composed more than 400 songs including many of the biggest hits of the twentieth century, Arlen has never been a household name. Though he was the songwriter’s songwriter, when “Over the Rainbow” was voted the No. 1 “Song of the Century” by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001, Judy Garland’s name was there but Arlen’s name was never mentioned. And yet, had you asked Garland, Sinatra, Ella or virtually any of the singers or songwriters closely associated with the classic American Songbook who their favorite songwriter was, the answer was simply, “Harold.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There are no seats for “Fuerza Bruta: Look Up”; you’ll spend the entire sixty-five minutes standing on the stage of the Auditorium Theatre. Actually, you’ll spend most of the time jumping, cheering and dancing along with the joyous cast of this truly spectacular event, leaving the theater in a state of euphoria, wanting more. Or not, if your idea of a night at the theater is a well-defined personal space and a performance that at least attempts to create a cohesive narrative. Cohesion is consciously, anarchically rejected in “Fuerza Bruta,” as evidenced in one of the pieces—the show is made up of a series of disconnected performance fragments—when the cast is crammed into a too-small room above and in front of the audience, fidgeting to the point of destruction, where walls made of boxes, furniture in the form of checkered-tableclothed plastic tables, chairs and trash cans are soon rained down toward us. Soon free of the confines of conformity, the cast breaks into a joyous dance before descending the stage to frolic amongst the audience, dancing, breaking harmless styrofoam forms over unexpectant heads and then suddenly disappearing to regroup for the next piece.

A cultural mashup that might be the perfect entertainment for our times, “Fuerza Bruta: Look Up” is a burst of joy, a feast for the eyes, ears and mind. A fin-du-monde what-the-hellness seems to wash over the whole affair, sometimes decadent, sometimes erotic, always playful. The cast is a handsome mix of youngish boho chics, with a vaguely exotic aura emanating from the Argentinean origins of the work’s artistic director/impresario Diqui James (who also co-founded the seminal “De La Guardia”), composer Gaby Kerpel and many of the other key creators and cast members. The show’s pieces seem to alternate between a dystopian futurism and a utopian surrealism, with tableaus distinctly conjuring up visual art motifs from those movements. Or, alternately, men suffer, women play. As in a man, in a suit and tie, running on a giant treadmill for no apparent reason. He is shot, wounded and keeps running. Does he represent the seemingly constant state of political turmoil, with coup d’états and brutal military regimes that haunt Latin America? Or perhaps the inextricable blend of big business and violence that accompanies commercial power flexed outside its natural borders? Juxtaposed with such dramatic imagery, women soon frolic balletically on a giant shimmering wall, as if dancing on the wind. Later, erotic nymphs enchant the crowd in a giant overhead dipping pool of sorts, conjuring up Homerian Sirens, Surrealism and synchronized swimming at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: AJ Zanyk

By Monica Westin

Playwright-director Young Jean Lee brings one of this spring’s most anticipated shows to the MCA this week: “The Shipment,” a subversive minstrelsy performance that’s in keeping with her history of experimental, confrontational plays about racial identity. What’s different is that where previous shows about race centered around stereotypes of the Korean-American experience Lee identifies with, “The Shipment” addresses African-American identity politics, presenting cultural images of Black America through various sketches, dance, stand-up comedy and drama.

We spoke with Lee about seeking discomfort, avoiding irony and bringing her ever-changing and highly praised show to Chicago.

“The Shipment” has gone through several adaptations after what you’ve described as “unsuccessful workshops.” Has it continued to change?

We’ve continued to tweak the show based on where we are in performances, from Carolina to Europe… We actually had to make a major change in touring the show in Europe because in the first shows the audience thought the play was about how backwards Americans are for having race problems—one more quaint story of American stupidity—with the idea that Europe doesn’t have race problems. We had to add in a long paragraph making clear that they were implicated too. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The world of experimental performance can feel quite elusive and tough to navigate in Chicago—lucky for us, accomplished local artists Mark Jeffrey (SAIC faculty) and Sara Schnadt (Department of Cultural Affairs) are working hard to make it a little easier, by curating the bi-annual IN>TIME Performance Series. An eclectic mix of local, national and international artists, this latest installation of IN>TIME includes a much anticipated work-in-progress showing from new local company Every House Has a Door, which is the latest project of Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, co-founders of the renowned Goat Island performance group (of which Jeffrey was a member), which disbanded in 2008. Other artists include Angela Ellsworth, presenting “Another Women’s Movement,” a “roaming durational tableau of well-armed frontier women;” SAIC students and emerging local artists Justin Cabrillos and Jessica Hannah, performing work developed through the IN>TIME Incubation series; and, featured international performance group OOUR, from Zagreb, Croatia. So clear your calendar for Saturday night—this is a one-night-only event, not to be missed.

In conversation with the performance series, there will be an artists’ symposium on Friday afternoon, examining professional sustainability for artists. The panel will feature an array of prominent artists and scholars, including Sara Jane Bailes, Roberto Sifuentes, and Tricia Van Eck. (Valerie Jean Johnson)

IN>TIME Performance Series: Saturday, March 27. 6pm-9pm, Chicago Cultural Center. Free. Symposium: Friday, March 26, 1pm-5pm. Chicago Cultural Center, 5th floor, Millennium Park Room. Free (reservations required).