RECOMMENDED

If you’re into performance and Poonie’s Cabaret isn’t on your radar, it should be. A quarterly event curated by Jyl Fehrenkamp, the cabaret features works from the realms of dance, performance art, clowning, burlesque and improvization. Fehrenkamp both scouts some artists and is personally approached by others after shows to become involved. “I’m loosely a curator,” she says, noting that her job, to showcase a strong mix of performance and dance, is easy to do in a city with so much talent. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Jennifer Korff

RECOMMENDED

This is your last weekend to catch Cupola Bobber’s “Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me” at Links Hall, and if you’re interested in performance that’s as concerned with wordplay as with image and movement, it’s a show that will offer a lot of food for thought. Focused on the sea, the piece is woven together with threads of different historical moments and psychological affects related to the ocean, from the nostalgia of seaside resort towns to a gloriously bizarre erosion narrative that tells the story of buildings and even towns that have slipped into the sea, and, as a perfect foil, the Depression dust bowl of Kansas. The piece is nearly as intellectually engaged and critically connected as an academic essay. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The idea of a festival of experimental art may sound like a shaky proposition for tentative audiences.  If there is any place in Chicago I trust to do it right, Links Hall is the place. All month long Links Hall presents “Treasure Hunt,” a festival of boundary-breaking work.  Curated by Angeline Gragasin, Links Hall artistic associate, each week will bring a new bill of artists, a variety format that  Links Hall is especially terrific at doing.  Though you may not (and probably won’t) love everything you see, chances are something will tickle just the right visceral or intellectual spot. Performances that will pack the venue will include a one-man punk/gospel/big-beat band, psychedelic video segments from the Internet art scene, an interactive performance responding to pop-culture art and queer stand-up comedy.  See what’s happening week by week at linkshall.org (William Scott)

At Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (773)281-0824, through March 29.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

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. “2x2x2” 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.