Alexa J. Rittichier and her ensemble People on a Stage will perform their work Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking at a work-in-progress showing. The performance will be this coming Monday, April 1, at 3:00 p.m. in the second floor performance space 221 at 916 South Wabash Avenue.
“We are excited to preview this work before our upcoming appearance at the 19th Annual Performance Studies International Conference in Los Angeles in June,” said Alexa. “This is a chance for us to perform the work once more in Chicago, and receive feedback on the performance. We are hoping to have many questions from our audience at the preview!”
Alexa’s work explores interactions between visual and performing art, interrogating themes of life and death, loss and gain, creation and destruction. Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking springs from her interdisciplinary method for developing work from visceral impulses, where she uses the body as a place for the germination of ideas. The People on a Stage ensemble includes dancers and performers Lydia Feuerhelm, Jenny Garnett, Emily Rose, Courtney St. Clair, Michael St. John, and Don Widmer, who use the piece to challenge the current cultural obsession with individualism. An additional community aspect to the project is the ensemble’s Indiegogo fundraising campaign, which is harnessing social media methods to attract the interest and engagement of people who, with small contributions, will be underwriting the ensemble’s rehearsal, production, and transportation costs.
Close by, at the For Public Consumption Pop-Up Gallery, MFA candidates in Annette Barbier’s Public Art course will present work over a five-day time slot. For Public Consumption is one of the Chicago Loop Alliance’s Pop Up Galleries, located on Randolph Street between between State and Dearborn, opposite the Oriental Theatre. The location has long been a hot spot for spontaneous as well as organized arts activism, having been the previous home of Chicago’s Block 37, Maggie Daley’s memorable city arts block. InterArts MFA students will be showing interactive and video projection work within a month-long program through April. Each individual artist will rotate an artwork through the space for about four or five days, until all have presented.
Currently on display is Eyesight Surveillance Window by Leonardo Selvaggio, which will show through this Friday evening, March 29. Upcoming work includes installations by Scott Dickens, Dennis Burke, Greg Browe, Folleh Tamba, Adrienne Canzolino, Graham Heath, Justin Botz, and Tom Ruiz.
