IN>TIME at the Chicago Cultural Center
For all you performance art fans out there, you’ll be happy to hear that IN>TIME, an annual Chicago performance series hosted by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Performance Department, is back for its second year to showcase local, national, and international artists at the Cultural Center in downtown Chicago. I met up with the curators of this event, Mark Jeffrey and Sara Schnadt of the Chicago Performance Network, and asked them a few questions about the event. Please note that answers are paraphrased, unless marked in quotations.
This year, five performance based pieces will highlighted. Groups range from locally commissioned artists, to those from Arizona and Croatia. These five pieces are briefly (and very literally for the not-so-conceptually-enthusiastic) described:
- Chicago artist group Every House Has a Door’s They’re Mending the Great Frest Highway is a dance for three men with a female DJ/classically trained pianist modeled after a series of eight Hungarian Folksongs by Béla Bartók composed in 1917.
- Commissioned emerging artist Justin Cabrillos’ Faces, Varieties, Postures is a site-sensitive response to the Chicago Cultural Center’s dual histories as a public library and Civil War memorial. The Gar Rotunda will be Cabrillos’ canvas for a poetic transformation of his research material during his residency at the Cultural Center, focusing on the relationship between language and the body.
- Commissioned artist Jessica Hannah’s The Living Room is a life-size domestic diorama with characters that inhabit the environment of her research during her residency at the Cultural Center. Post-WWII ration-less consumption, romantic and industrial films of the 1950s, and the boom of mid-century housing developments are explored in the space, providing multiple points of access through live movement, spoken and recorded text, video footage, scent, and live musical soundtrack.
- Angela Ellsworth’s Another Women’s Movement merges an American-born dance craze with an American-born polygamous sect through silent line-dancing with nine sister-wife characters representing Ellsworth’s research of Joseph Smith’s prophecy of the Civil War in relation to her family’s Mormon background in Utah. This performance is a part of Ellsworth’s Sister-Wife Project, an ongoing investigation into her family’s lineage of Mormon polygamy.
- Croatian collaborative group OOUR Zagreb’s Creation of Eve represents the first Croatian group to perform in the Midwest, and underscores two extreme dance potentials through coordinated movement of communal bodies versus an emancipated one through which the body becomes a basic expression.