This year’s Rhinoceros Theater Festival is setting up to be a momentous performance extravaganza, with both InterArts media faculty and students engaging in active roles as producers, directors, and performers.
Each year, Curious Theatre Branch, a brainchild of InterArts faulty member Jenny Magnus in collaboration with Beau O’Reilly, curates and produces the Rhino Fest, which provides production and exhibition opportunities to hundreds of artists, drawing thousands in attendance each year. The longest-running multi-arts fringe festival in Chicago, the Rhino Fest features works in theater and performance from Chicago companies and national artists alike.
The festival, now in its 25th year, begins this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. with The Full Moon Vaudeville, a long-term project of the Curious Theatre Branch and the Rhino Fest. The opening night performance is billed as “a place to put all the strange little things, all the strange people, all the strange and beautiful moments that don’t fit elsewhere.” Second-year media student Sid Yiddish will be performing that evening with this orchestra, The Candy Store Henchmen. They will present Flight Of The Satanic Danish Post-Apocalyptic New York Sexist Jewish Hillbilly Squirrel, which Yiddish describes as “A Zionist glandless skunk going nuts in the service of its faith while struggling with Satanism by coddling its hillbilly relatives. In other words, a squirrel with contradictions.”
Magnus describes the Vaudeville show as a unique experience for both the audience and performers: “What I think is most cool about the Rhino and the Vaudeville is a notion about participation and response. Instead of relying on the academy or the institutions of critics to affirm what we are doing, we invite artists to respond via their art. That is the most meaningful kind of discourse for us, to see what YOU are making, when you come to see what WE are making. And when an artist is trying to have a whole life as a maker, have sustainability, fortitude, and an intrepid curiousity, then we need to find ways to love making things for each other, to be in love with the simplicity of being in a room with people and showing them what you got. That is the ethos that Rhino, the Curious, and the Vaudeville really live by.”
Justin Botz
The next InterArts student performance is second-year media student Justin Botz, who will perform his solo one-act play Dreams of a Possible End on January 19 at 5:00 p.m. and January 20 at 7:00 p.m. Botz describes the work as “a meditation on the ends of things. Murky post-apocalyptic worlds, bomb shelters, survival of the fittest, an old testament prophet playing hacked instruments eating angel food cake, attempting before the imminent end to answer the question, ‘With the time given, what?’”
Kellen Walker and her collaborators
Third-year media student Kellen Walker will be performing Game Night on February 2 from 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Directed by Walker and written by Walker in collaboration with performers Christopher Bednash (an InterArts second-year media student) & Jessica Quazi, Game Night is “an interactive, multi-sensory performance that illustrates how a post-stroke point of view would look, sound, smell and taste.” Inspired by the grandmother of Walker and her collaborating performers’ family members and patients in head injury rehabilitation, the performance is an “endearing clasp on the before and after moments that compose our lives.” Music for the performance is written by Darkest Wonder.
The festival closes in the third week in March with an extra gala week to celebrate the release of the new book by Magnus, Observations of an Orchestrated Catastrophe, out in February from Jackleg Press. Seven plays in four days will be performed by some of Chicago’s favorite invited soloists and theater companies.
For more information about the festival, which includes a multitude performances January –March, click here. For tickets, click here.
