Megumi Eda and Luke Manley in "The Watteau Duets"/Photo: Erin Baiano

RECOMMENDED

Noise rock meets ballet in a revival of Karole Armitage’s 1981 piece “Drastic-Classicism.” Dancers share the stage with the band, which includes Chicagoans Mike Vallera and Shelly Steffens. Armitage’s aggressive movement vocab captures well the adolescent rage and sexual fervor that made your parents hate the music and wait up for you in the living room with the lights off. Is this piece really more than thirty years old? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Three years ago, spoken word and dance artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph brought an interdisciplinary musing abut the complications of identity on “planet hip-hop” to the MCA stage. Now Joseph is back with a synthesis of music, dance, story and visual art, culled from community-based “eco-festivals” he held in four cities around the United States: Chicago, New York, Oakland and Houston. The focus this time is sustainability—of the natural environment, of communities (some consider these mutually dependent)—in the face of violent crime, poor education and the immediate crises facing communities of color. Read the rest of this entry »

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performing "The Matter of Origins"/Photo: Jaclyn Borowski.

By Sharon Hoyer

The terms investigation, exploration and research show up a lot in artist statements and program notes these days, but few artists use the words as comprehensively as Liz Lerman, former artistic director of the DC-based Dance Exchange. Lerman’s enthusiastic curiosity has led her to collaborate with numerous minds in the fields of science and academics as well as the arts, creating performances around topics as diverse as genetics, immigration, death, spirituality, Reaganomics, the Nuremberg Trials and the Underground Railroad. Lerman’s talent for uncovering how specialized fields intersect in dance springs from a very direct inclusiveness in her work that takes in the five generations of dancers represented in Dance Exchange and, particularly in the case of “The Matter of Origins” (playing as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival), her audiences.

“The Matter of Origins” explores physics and human theories about the beginning of time in two acts: the first is a traditional stage performance that includes massive projections of images like Marie Curie’s lab and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; the second is a tea party with chocolate cake (Lerman got Edith Warner’s recipe, the woman who served lunch to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists at Los Alamos while they were developing the nuclear bomb). The audience sits at round tables with local scientists and “provocateurs,” who help guide the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: George Ruhe

RECOMMENDED

The MCA is currently presenting a compelling retrospective on the forty-year artistic journey of Eiko and Koma—movement artists born in postwar Japan, trained by Butoh founders Tatsumi Hijkata and Kazuo Ohno, emigrated to the U.S. in the seventies, who create stark, intensely present work on subjects of nature and corporeality. Photography and documentation are on display in the gallery, and this weekend is the central stage performance component of the project. Read the rest of this entry »

By  Monica Westin

Under Peter Taub’s direction, the Museum of Contemporary Art comes full circle this year with its development residency for Curious Theatre Branch: The MCA’s performance program began decades ago with informal performances by Chicago avant-garde mainstays like Goat Island and Curious. After expanding to include, and occasionally focus most on, global and international performers, the MCA Stage has returned to its roots the last couple of years, with high-profile residencies and performances for Every House Has a Door (a Goat Island reincarnation), Lucky Plush and 500 Clown. But rather than a short creative residency (usually only a few days or sometimes weeks), Curious artist Jenny Magnus has been in residency at the MCA for a full year as she developed “Still in Play: A Performance of Getting Ready.” We spoke with Magnus the week before her show opened about the intrigue of rehearsal and residencies writ large.  Read the rest of this entry »

"Raven"/Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

A large canvas curtain pressed with black feathers cordons off a section of clean white gallery space. Holes are rent throughout the curtain, inviting visitors to step close and peer through. What they see is a large nest—or perhaps island—of earth, twigs and feathers and strewn atop the angular limbs of artists Eiko and Koma. The viewer may enter the dimly lit space behind the curtain and witness the quiet drama of the two naked bodies, reclined but activated, moving constantly though near-imperceptibly, in a silent dance that evokes meditations on death and the eternal.

The performance is entitled “Naked: a living installation” and comes to the MCA as part of a touring retrospective on the career of Japanese-born, New York-based dance artists Eiko and Koma. The couple has been creating work about subjects that, as they put it, matter to them (and indeed matter to us all) for forty years. Trained by Kazuo Ohno, one of the two founders of the slow, detailed, bleak and infinitely rich dance style butoh, Eiko and Koma draw attention to our perceptions of time and space and our physical places within them. “Naked,” as the full title suggests, is a durational piece, performed nonstop during museum hours. Visitors may sit and watch the piece evolve for as long as they please—an invitation to notice more, to experience the intimacy of the space, to become more absorbed in the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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 »