RECOMMENDED

“What is more important than the way we relate to each other? “ This is the question central to “Social Studies” at Links Hall.  The show features three dance artists presenting works that investigate our relationship to each other and our environment.  Kendall Loyer explores the give and take of love and loyalty during high school in a strangely nostalgic piece set to her high school’s alma mater, a wistful love song and several confessional monologues.  Aislinn Gagliardi explores the concept of isolation within a group in a piece that searches for connection between an endless landscape filled with a merciless sun and a constant parade of group snapshots.  Megan Rhyme presents an eerily moving piece about three ancient and crooked women.  She investigates the line between sexuality and desperation as a solo performer in a Cinderella gown.  Special guests Susan Aldous and Margaret Rose Breffeilh will show dance films, and the paintings of guest artist Joanna Raabe will be displayed during and after the performance. (William Scott)

At Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824, Fri-Sat 8pm/Sun 7pm. $10-$12.

Movement artists work with a complex and, at times, contradictory instrument. Our bodies are repositories for memories; emotions long stored within joints and muscles can be unlocked with a gesture or a touch. Likewise, the body is capable of purely spontaneous expression, of creating art that exists solely within the moment, the nuances of which can never be perfectly replicated. The three choreographers working with the Synapse Arts Collective in this weekend’s “Kinetic Current” at explore these themes with the aid of a little artistic cross-pollination.

“It’s an interdisciplinary performance,” says Synapse artistic director Rachel Damon. “Each movement artist is working with a medium they’ve never used before.” For Sabrina Cavins, the media in question are film and text. In her solo piece “Weaving a Trail of Difference,” Cavins explores familial ties and conflicts, giving voice to her grandmother with video footage and text derived from their conversations while addressing issues of conflict and difference through live movement.

Elisa Foshay, making her directorial debut, collaborates with Chef James Okuno to tickle the audience’s taste buds along with their olfactory sense memory. During Foshay’s “Dwelling” the audience is served foods selected to complement the choreography and to, as Damon puts it, “Evoke a palate of memories.”

In contrast, Damon’s own contribution is an invitation to the revelations of the moment. “2×2x2” is an improvised, durational piece incorporating voice and motion. “We’re a team working together,” Damon says of dancers John Peruzzi, Sonya Siefert and Laura Tennal in this series of three duets. “This is live-motion research for the coming year; each performance will be different.” Damon is joint recipient of the 2008 CROSSCUT grant through Experimental Sound Studio, a project that supports first-time collaboration between movement artists and musicians.

The spirit of fostering new talent is part of Synapse Arts Collective mission. “Kinetic Current” is the first show not under Damon’s direction. “We want to provide opportunities to emerging artists that they can’t get through school or professional internships,” she says. “Elisa has learned to produce an entire show with the aid of our resources. We want to continue to support these visions.” (Sharon Hoyer)

Synapse Arts Collective presents “Kinetic Current” June 20-21 at Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824. $12.

Last November, Same Planet Different World Dance Theater held its tenth-anniversary performance at the Ruth Page Dance Center. The show was a retrospective of the vernal company’s most popular works from the last decade. In “Vintage Modern”—as the self-contradictory title coyly suggests—we get a glimpse of the future along with the past, and witness how experience forges the identity of a young group on the cusp of maturity. SPDW has earned a reputation over the last decade for dabbling in eclectic moods and styles, often with a healthy share of humor and wit. This is largely thanks to a diverse repertory built by many artists—including local virtuosos like Shirley Mordine, whose late-1990s duet “Thin Ice” returns for this performance. The latter half of the SPDW term has seen, under the direction of Katie Saifuku and Joanna Rosenthal, rigorous evolution.

“We want to grow in every way possible: the number of performances we do, the number of pieces in our repertory,” Rosenthal says. “We’ve always had a variety of work and we’ll continue along those lines.”

Parallel ideas are woven into the fabric of “Vintage Modern.” The show is a concise hour and ten minutes, consisting of two duets and two trios—all by different choreographers—that work in complementary pairs. The title piece is a trio by Zachary Wittenburg, who lifted the name from a style of design that has become, somewhat ironically, timeless by sheer virtue of repetition. In contrast to Wittenburg’s large, balletic shapes is Ashleigh Leite’s trio “Drift League”—a deconstruction in which the dancers repeat, shuffle and rebuild a limited set of movements without use of their arms. One dancer compared the experience of being in both pieces to reading the same book in two different languages. Faye Driscoll’s raw, vibrant duet “Hearts on Fire” closes the show, serving in some ways as the female counterpart to the fraternal “Thin Ice.” “Vintage Modern” matches variety with unity, classical sensibility with playful experimentation—a tenuous balance honed by hammers of experience and time. (Sharon Hoyer)

At Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

You can always count on Links Hall to provide intriguing, multifaceted performances that live nowhere near inside the box. I have seen clowns, cartoons and music played on toys take the boards of this little theater that achieves big. The Link-up Artist-in-Residence program at the Hall seems to give voice to big imaginations. This time, 2004 resident Jyl Fehrenkamp is bringing us “Poonie’s Cabaret,” a one-night program she curates and hosts. “Poonie’s Cabaret” features artists working in varied creative realms including dance, music, puppetry, performance art, theater, voguing, freestyle rapping, drag, burlesque, cheerleading, stand-up comedy and more. Artists Kirby Reed, Paige Cunningham, Marc Macaranas, Amanda Timm and Breakbone DanceCo will join Fehrenkamp for the evening named in loving memory of Chicago dancer/choreographer Poonie Dodson. And if that does not sound fun enough, it is all for a great cause. “Cabaret” proceeds support the Duncan Erley Coming Out of the Closet Fund. (William Scott)

“Poonie’s Cabaret” takes place June 9 at Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824, at 8pm. $5.

“My poetry lives more in the mouth and ear…than on the page,” says multi-disciplinary artist Fiona Templeton. “And specifically in multiple mouths and ears.” She has been experimenting with the various intersections between the written and the performative as a poet, playwright, director and performer for more than thirty years—in both a traditional theater environment and often in alternative, site-specific settings. Her wide-ranging body of work (as solo artist, co-founder of London’s Theatre of Mistakes and the international performance group The Relationship) blurs and illuminates the lines between artistic genres through the use of audio, video and live staging. This weekend her work is being featured at Links Hall, as part of curator John Beer’s “Returning from One Place to Another: A Poet’s Theater Showcase.” Templeton directs two short pieces: first, an excerpt from Louis Zukofsky’s “famously obscure” experimental translation of Plautus’ “Rudens.” The second piece is part of a new work-in-progress written by Templeton herself, tentatively titled “Bluebeard.” 

I caught up with Templeton shortly after her arrival in Chicago on Monday, and only a few hours before her first rehearsal with Joel Craig, Laura Goldstein and Pam Osbey, the local performers she’s collaborating with on both performances. When I ask about the possibilities and pressures of working with unfamiliar artists in such a short rehearsal period, she responds with an eager anticipation of collective discoveries. “I’m not teaching a piece…there are things [about the work that] I don’t know either.” Over the course of four days, Templeton and her ensemble will collectively develop the performative structures of each piece, and investigate the ways in which the two works communicate. “Content-wise, [these] are two separate pieces,” Templeton explains. “The connection is in the performance strategies.” Templeton describes these strategies as “an exploration of simultaneity,” where the speaking voice and the speaking subject shift, morph and coalesce—characters onstage may at any given time be speaking for themselves/as themselves, for each other/as each other, or vocalizing one another’s internal monologues.

 While the “narrative” of each play is starkly different (“Rudens” is a somewhat darkly comedic tale of a girl kidnapped by pirates, while “Bluebeard” follows two people’s expedition into each other’s minds, fears and desires), it is in their linguistic action that the two converge. It is theater that Templeton illustrates as coming undone in many ways—rather than concretizing character and plot, “attempt[ing] to unbraid the multiplicity of voice.” “This,” she says, “is a theater that explodes.” (Valerie Jean Johnson)

At Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824. This production is now closed. 

For thirty years, Links Hall has been a veritable epicenter of cross-culture multidisciplinary performing arts in Chicago. Evolving since its inception in 1978 as a small artists’ cooperative to a year-round producing organization, it supplies affordable rental and performance space for independent theater and dance companies and individual artists, offers a variety of workshops and lectures and provides artists’ residency programs supporting in-depth creative development of new work. In addition, since 2005 Links has dedicated a quarter of each year’s programming to three month-long performance series, curated by invited Artistic Associates. The final installment of the program for the 2008 season begins May 2—a Poet’s Theater Showcase entitled “Returning from One Place to Another,” curated by poet and essayist (not to mention former Newcity contributing writer) John Beer.

 Beer’s interest in the inherent binding ties between poetry and performance runs deep; in citing the work of Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare to Richard Foreman, Beer gives credence to the historical fluidity of what defines the term “poet’s theater,” while recognizing what he sees as the “divorce between primarily realistic modes of theater and a lyric poetry rooted in subjective experience.” Beer’s efforts to address this contrary compartmentalization of the innately linked disciplines through performance has led to the assemblage of four poetic works that “retain a focus on language and structure while potentially abandoning traditional elements of narrative or staging,” developed by five genre-bending artists deservingly cited by Links Hall Executive Director CJ Mitchell as some of the most “innovative and distinctive” practitioners in the literary and performance worlds today.

Rodrigo Toscano, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Fiona Templeton and Carla Harryman make up Beer’s visiting artist roster—which he is well aware reads like a who’s who of contemporary experimental language artists. “From the initial impetus [of this project], I made up a dream list of collaborators,” says Beer, “and I was able to get everyone I wanted.” Each artist/team has paired up with two or three local collaborators—each an influential member of the Chicago lit community in their own right (Jennifer Karmin, David Trinidad, Pam Osbey and Fred Sasaki, to name just a few), and will have a mere four days to develop and rehearse their performance piece before going live in front of audiences for a subsequent Friday/Saturday/Sunday run. In addition to the month-long performance schedule, Beer has organized a free open-to-the-pubic panel discussion to examine the theoretical and pedagogical aspects of performance poetry, featuring poets, critics and performers, including experimental performance heavyweights Jenny Magnus of Curious Theatre Branch and Goat Island’s Matthew Goulish.

 Because of the “on-the-fly” nature of this project, surprises are most certainly in store for audiences and performers alike. “Writing itself is a kind of moment-to-moment performance,” observes Beer. And this programming seeks to reflect that idea, recognizing that “the mode of composition itself is a vital part of the [end result].” But it’s the process of making the work, not the product, that most interests Beer as a curator of this showcase of poetic theater: “[A certain] rawness is intentional,” he attests. “Traces of the process will be visible as part of the performance.” (Valerie Jean Johnson)

“Returning from One Place to Another: A Poet’s Theater Showcase” at Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824.  This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

“So, a little bit about us. We are four—Blanca Aviles, Olivia Bustos Rodriguez, Emily Haines, Angelica Palomo—dancers, choreographers, performers and regular artsy fartsy beasts in and around the Chicago area. In our first show as independent artists, ‘Breaking Ground,’ we are revisiting, revising and reliving works originally made on the stage of Columbia College Chicago,” this foursome of eclectic women declares on their MySpace page. With varied skills and experiences including modern, hip-hop, tap, Pilates, yoga and a extensive influences in Mexican folkloric traditions (Olivia was a violinist/vocalist in a mariachi band for over ten years), these burgeoning choreographers are looking to make a distinctive mark in the Chicago dance community. They explore personal experiences and relationships with family, gender in our society and the influences of being Latina in the U.S. Links Hall presents these exciting talents in their exhibition of budding choreographers. (William Scott)

At Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield, (773)281-0824. This production is now closed.

By William Scott

It is not every day that a dead playwright gets a world premiere. Tennessee Williams has always been a man of exceptions. SummerNITE (Northern Illinois Theatre Ensemble), the resident Equity company operated by Northern Illinois University, is bringing Williams’ voice once more to life in a way no one has ever experienced it—through Japanese tradition. The play is “The Day on Which a Man Dies.” Completed in 1960 and subtitled “an Occidental Noh play,” this dramatic departure in genre from the balmy Southern gothic to Japanese Noh was alluded to casually by Williams in an interview. It was dug up in 1991 by American scholar Allean Hale from the UCLA Library where it was deposited in 1970 with unnumbered pages. Since then the play owes its life in great part to director/designer David Kaplan.

Kaplan has been producing Williams’ work, both new and old, for much of his career. For the past three years he has served as artistic curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival.  As such he says, “people tell him about plays.” “The Day on Which a Man Dies” came to him by way of Thomas Keith and Annette Saddik, the publisher and editor, respectively of the soon-to-be-published script. The confidently aggressive director knew it was for him. “The things that were hard and unusual and interesting, I had been doing for twenty years,” he says. Kaplan has studied and directed Tennessee Williams from Alabama to Hong Kong and in languages including Russian and Cantonese.  He knew immediately he wanted to do this piece strictly as an artist. “I didn’t want to produce it myself. I wanted to think about it as a designer and director and not have that other responsibility.” He was also weary of the delicate piece being buried in his festival.

“Is there something you want to direct that you can’t do in the festival?” came the call last November from Christopher Markle, a friend of Kaplan and artistic director of SummerNITE. “There is actually,” he said, and the project commenced.

The play is a reflection of sex as power using the Noh elements of dance, music and storytelling. The result is a work with the poetry of Tennessee Williams and the ceremonial tradition of fourteenth-century Japan. A famous American painter (inspired by Jackson Pollock) and his mistress argue violently in a Tokyo hotel room. They make up, make love and ultimately betray each other. Crucial stage directions mirror a form of Japanese performance art called Gutai. The tragic end for the painter and the eccentric means by which paintings are created onstage are characteristically Gutai.

Because of busy schedules the play was rehearsed for a week in June, a week in October, and two weeks leading to an opening on February 1 at Links Hall. While not the ideal, Kaplan is happy with the way it has served this piece by giving the performers time to study the material and do the appropriate research. Luckily too, he has previous relationships with several members of the cast.  Jennie Moreau, a former student of Kaplan, is an educator herself and teaches from Kaplan’s book, “Five Approaches to Acting.” After seeing Steve Key in “Orpheus Descending” at American Theater Company in 2005, she alerted Kaplan to the actor’s adept skill with Williams’ language.  The eager director arrived Super Bowl weekend last year to see for himself and was taken with Key’s talent; moreover, he appreciated Key’s willingness to join him for a drink after the show to talk Southern playwrights instead of rushing to watch the game. Lucky he did.

Kaplan is magnetic when he talks about his team and his work. He is excited by the prospect of sharing his knowledge of the things he loves. The cast and crew seem infused with the same excitement. And so they should be. There are three Tennessee Williams festivals in America and theaters everywhere are eager for new work. It has been some time since “The Day on Which a Man Dies” flowed from the pen of a man David Kaplan calls a “shaman of the human condition” and Mr. Williams’ tribute to Japanese tradition may only be beginning its journey in Chicago.

“The Day on Which a Man Dies” at Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824. This production is now closed.

“It feels pretty lucky to have friendships with people you are star-struck by,” says Links Hall artistic associate Kate Sheehy.

Throughout the month of January she is ready to celebrate those creative minds by curating a loony little festival aptly titled “Method to Madness.” These multi-disciplinary events include puppetry, performance, film and sound. Each week, artists investigate the process of their creative practice, offering a behind-the-scenes exploration of what makes them tick. In addition to the four weekends of performances by local and national artists, each week features a different skill-share workshop designed to broaden the idea of what creativity is. These large concepts are what Sheehy has been intrigued by for years, several times opening her own home to performances in her attic and installations in her closets and bathrooms as part of her Random House Shows.

Sheehy thinks of her work as, “creating the space, then inviting that space to happen.” It has taken her a year and a half to create the space for “Method to Madness” in Links Hall.

If you want the full festival experience the following schedule will give you a great cross section: See Program Two (January 11-13) in which Clare Dolan of Vermont’s internationally renowned Bread and Puppet Theater gives audiences toy theater in “The Road to Brody.” This anti-war short story by Russian Jewish writer Issac Babel is part of an evening featuring five other artists. Then join the skill share Saturday morning (January 12) for “A Story In Miniature: Toy Theatre Workshop.” Punctuating the festival will be a special matinee performance (January 27) of Chicago Children’s Theater’s “The Selfish Giant” adapted and created by Blair Thomas/Fast Fish Puppet Theatre. This is merely a sampling of what “Method to Madness” has to offer. Get the complete programming lineup at www.linkshall.org. (William Scott)

The “Method to Madness Festival” at Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824. This production is now closed.

By Debbie Goldgaber

For the dance-curious but post-modern w(e)ary, dance showcases offer a sampling of innovative dance without the commitment, or cost, for that matter. With only about twenty minutes to present their work, performers are likely to leave their audience’s attention piqued rather than tested, and any too-obscure movement experiment is mercifully cut-short.

Running over two weekends, the second annual LinkUp Residency showcase is among the most promising and affordable (it’s free). Presenting their 2007 artists-in-residence at the Cultural Center beginning December 3, Links Hall, founded in the 1970s by a group of independent choreographers and artists, has essentially curated a show of Chicago’s emerging movement artists.

A look at the resident-artists’ bios reveals a refreshing lack of genre bias—among the residents are performance artists, musicians and, of course, choreographers. “The only stipulation we place on the artists is that the piece developed over the course of the residency incorporate movement. We consciously left the nature of the movement undefined,” explains Jennifer Thornton, managing director of Links Hall. The result is a showcase including everything from dance inspired by classical opera (Kairol Rosenthal’s “Intimae”) to a musical performance paying homage to a reality-TV star (Dan Mohr’s “Guns, Aloe”).

The Links Residence Program, in its fifth season, has gradually increased its scope. Originally providing its resident artists with weekly access to studio space, residents now receive a cash grant, mentoring and, most importantly, multiple performance opportunities. Having already presented their work at the Links Hall work-in-progress series, the fully produced showcase at the Cultural Center’s Dance Studio marks the culmination of their residency—giving the artists a chance to reach larger and more diverse audiences than they would otherwise draw.

The residency program is exactly the kind of opportunity that Jonathan Meyer, dancer and artistic director of Khecari Dance, was looking for when he moved his company from the flatlands of Taos, New Mexico to Chicago. “Taos has a long history of supporting the visual arts but, given a population of 6,000, the performing arts have a much harder time. I was looking for the opportunities and the audiences that a city like Chicago could support.” Originally slated to present “Opal Door”—a theatrical meditation on apocalyptic themes that Khecari performed at Links Hall back in March—Meyer opted to present an excerpt from his latest work instead.

“An Absence of Meaning Opens a Rift in Time”—the piece they’ll perform Monday—is taken from the third act of “The Wonder-Cabinet of Dr. Wunderkammer,” a show Khecari just closed at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse. “Absence” explores, “on twin tracks,” what Meyer calls “the experience of throwness—a sort of productive failure of interpretation that simultaneously unsettles and fascinates”—and, yes, slime mold.

While the juxtaposition of themes yields a certain comic effect, Meyer is serious about the implications. As it turns out, slime mold, he explains, goes through biological phases and transformations that invite us to meditate on certain aspects of our own nature. Specifically, the individual spores comprising slime mold begin life autonomously but end up communally defined, developing specialized functions. The point for Meyer is that, at all levels of life, structures exhibit the unresolved tension between the individual and the community, producing in the process strange and sometimes discordant spaces.

Performed by three dancers—Julia Rae Antonick, Asimina Chremos and Meyer—“Absence” includes, along with intricate partnering, some movement improvisation that, Meyer admits, initially made him nervous. “You have the sense of offering something to the audience but not really knowing exactly what it is.” On the other hand, given the piece’s exploration of meaning and interpretation, improvisation seems entirely natural and appropriate.

Presenting symbiosis of a different sort, LinkUp Resident Dan Mohr, performs “Guns, Aloe: The Worldly Observations and Further Breakdown of Andrae Gonzalo” during the production’s second weekend. The show, “part song cycle, part confessional, part hazy exploration on the nature and purpose of fashion,” is based on the actions of the “Project Runway” reality-TV star. Obviously impressed, Andrae, who attended the premiere performance of Mohr’s work back in September at Links Hall, plans to host Mohr in L.A. next year. A reminder, perhaps, to support and appreciate local emerging artists while they’re still local.

At the Dance Studio, Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph, (312)744-7630. This production is now closed.