A showcase of performance works by Chicago artists
September 7–10, 2023
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, is thrilled to announce the 2023 Chicago Performs showcase—an intimate festival of live arts highlighting essential local artists on a national platform.
Chicago Performs is an annual celebration of Chicago-based artists working across a variety of disciplines in performance. Each year, the platform demonstrates the vitality of Chicago artists on a national stage by inviting three to four local artists to share new works of performance, including pieces developed through the MCA’s In Progress series and New Works Initiative. The series brings together work across genres and career-stages and provides a platform for Chicago artists to develop projects that will push them into new phases of their artistic practice. The 2023 iteration of Chicago Performs includes work by Irene Hsiao, Jonas Becker, and Anjal Chande.
“The MCA is proud to use our platform to highlight the local artists and creativity that is coming out of Chicago,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the MCA. “Events like this invite diverse audiences into an open space to experience and discuss contemporary work being created in our city.”
To close the weekend, the artists will sit for a moderated talk.
“For many artists in this series it’s their first time working on a stage as large as the MCA’s, with the full support of its technical equipment and staff. Artists are able to envision their work in entirely new ways and think about touring outside of our city for the first time,” said Curatorial Associate Laura Paige Kyber. “Similarly, it’s fabulous to host colleagues from across the country and have them visit the museum, get to know our city, and the artists who live here. It truly positions Chicago as a cultural hub.”
Chicago Performs is organized by Tara Aisha Willis, former Curator, with Laura Paige Kyber, Curatorial Associate.
Chicago Performs programs
Irene Hsiao: Blue Alice
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
September 7 and 9| 2pm
Blue Alice is a durational movement piece. Within a sculptural costume designed by Vin Reed made of tarp and mylar, Blue Alice continuously shape-shifts throughout the performance. Often performed in gallery spaces, Hsiao crafts her performance in response to the art works on view, operating on a spectrum between human and object. Blue Alice’s expansive dress creates a sound similar to the ocean or a monsoon as it moves, drawing attention to the fragility of the materials, and the strenuous nature of durational work. Imagining the costume as a shell, a shelter, or an armor though which viewers glimpse the shining creature hiding inside, Hsiao’s improvised performance plays with expected norms for how to interact with art and performance in a museum setting.
Anjal Chande: The Next Cup of Tea
Edlis Neeson Theater
September 7 and 8, 7:30–8:30pm
The Next Cup of Tea is a solo dance-theater performance by Anjal Chande that investigates how to make sense of the never-ending impulses that run through our heads, our everyday moments, and our contradictory experiences. Through improvisational dance and storytelling, Chande reflects on money and being brown in a stratified America, routine interactions with her grandfather, the paradox of art, and more. Chande’s improvisational movement follows her non-conformist impulses, whether that be the bharatanatyam technique in which she is trained, pedestrian habits, mood or personality, or other subconscious influences. The Next Cup of Tea explores the intersection between mundane materiality and the mind’s subjective world. Through interaction with abstract props, Chande contrasts the ordinariness of daily physical routine with the compelling, gnawing quality of inner feelings eager to be seen, heard, and understood. Juxtaposing the personal, political, and philosophical dimensions of the individual experience, The Next Cup of Tea serves as an introspective invitation to look at our kaleidoscopic interior, and to accept the task of deciphering whatever it is we feel today.
Jonas Becker: New Normal
Edlis Neeson Theater
September 9, 7:30–8:30pm and September 10, 2–3pm
Jonas Becker’s New Normal explores how we, as individuals in society, adjust to large-scale cultural trauma, environmental deterioration, the loss of civil liberties, and increased financial precarity. As conditions erode over time, expectations shift silently for some, for others violently. In this iterative performance, six male-identified performers respond to the slow violence of our current moment through endurance and illusion, struggle and support. Rocks that appear heavy are made of paper, and gestures where performers entangle each other oscillate between aggression and care. Importantly, some radical bodies resist normalization, while for others, the new normal is nothing new. The performers test their limits, adjust, and readjust, responding physically to diminishing environmental standards and political conditions. This presentation in the Edlis Neeson Theater expands on an In Progress showing of the work in the MCA’s main atrium in 2019, with an emotionally resonant arrangement of motion, sound and lighting.
