Photo by Chip Duggan

My friend and colleague Alexa Rittichier is currently working on her thesis project, People on a Stage.

People on a Stage is a performance ensemble made up of Lydia Feuerhelm, Jenny Garnett, Emily Rose, Courtney St.Clair, Michael Chad St. John, and Don Widmer. The performers make interdisciplinary performance work grown from the experience of being together as a collective through time. The process of making performance work each week is a form of artistic cross-training with a physical activity—examples include acroyoga, rock climbing, Butoh, modern dance, and cardio weight lifting.

The ensemble has dedicated itself to nine months of working together to develop their debut performance Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking. The commitment to participate in a collective creative practice encourages participants to think about otherness or to think about the self in relationship to others. It is a social revolution. It is a spiritual discipline.

Photo by Chip Duggan

Things have been going really well. Her work was even recently accepted into the Performance Studies International Conference at Stanford University this summer!

Their performance, Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking addresses our cultural obsession with individualism and fosters a collective cooperative lifestyle that builds harmony and addresses creativity as a group process.

Photo by Chip Duggan

The Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for the travel and the conference can be viewed here.

Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking will debut at Columbia College Chicago on April 26 and 27. More info at www.alexajrittichier.com/CollectingOurselves