February 2010 PERFORMANCE

Sound Paintings
Tryptich Toungs
SELF(ish) solo musings on the body and others
Pooney's Cabaret: Sexy, Tasty...DRAG!
THAW: Links Hall’s Night of Hot Winter Ballyhoo
THE WORLD IS FLAT! A WEEKEND OF TOY THEATER

February 1

Mon at 7:30pm
Tickets $10

Sound Paintings

composed by Chad Willetts

A view from the eyes of your mind"—In a completely darkened space, the evening explores your own visual generations derived from paintings of sound.

February 5-7

Fri & Sat at 8pm / Sun at 7pm
Tickets $15/ $10 students

Triptych Tongues

featuring Lisa Biggs, Misty DeBerry and Ni’Ja Whitson

A triple bill of dance, text and sound: Lisa Bigg’s The Long Way Home — a solo ghost story, Misty DeBerry’s Skyline — an ensemble movement exploration of architecture and society, and two dance works in development by Ni’Ja Whitson from a series exploring global conflict, materiality and site specificity.

February 12-14

Fri & Sat at 8pm / Sun at 7pm
Tickets $15/ $10 Students

SELF(ish)
Solo musings on the body and others

featuring Paul Escriva, Sentell Harper, James Leija, Carole McCurdy, Jennifer Morales, Erica Mott and Jennifer Shin

A valentine reunion of bodies and voices queering the boundaries between story and performance through tango, video, monologue, and repurposed trash.

February 22

Mon at 8pm
Tickets $5* or pay what you can

Poonies Cabaret presents:
Sexy, Tasty…DRAG!

featuring Ventrilla Kiss, Roco Granite, Floyd Farenheit, Bootsy,Mahogany la' Piranha, Eddy Mame, Sammy Shakes and more
       
Poonie's Cabaret serves up a hot treat on a cold winter's night.  This special drag and burlesque edition features a variety of gender benders and tasty toppings to warm your heart and melt your ice-cream coner.

Poonie’s Cabaret is Links Hall’s venue for improvisation and works in progress. Featuring artists working in many different creative realms - dance, music, contact improvisation, puppetry, performance art, theatre, voguing, freestyle rapping, drag, burlesque, cheerleading, stand-up comedy, etc.

Jyl Fehrenkamp is the host/curator of Poonie’s Cabaret.

* Poonie’s Cabaret was created by Selene Carter and is named in loving memory for Poonie Dodson, a much-loved Chicago dancer/choreographer who died of AIDS in the early 90s. Audience members are asked for a $5 donation. Proceeds from the cabaret go to the Links Hall Duncan Erley Coming Out of the Closet Fund, which is periodically awarded to artists whose work explores the realms of healing, gay activism, and spiritual and sexual transformation.

February 23

THAW: Links Hall’s Night
of Hot Winter Ballyhoo

The most spectacular winter benefit in town for minimal cabbage features tantalizing toy theater by freak show, prohibition era cocktails, hula hoop revels and other ballyhoo. Support Links Hall, get togged to the bricks and come for a ring-a-ding-ding, Dollface! 

February 25-28

THE WORLD IS FLAT!
A WEEKEND OF TOY THEATER

curated by 2009 Jeff Award-Winning theater artist Seth Bockley

Links Hall is bringing the national toy theater revival to Chicago.

The weekend will showcase Great Small Works’ classics, A Short Entertaining History of Toy Theater and A Walk in the City. Celebrated Chicago-based Puppeteer Blair Thomas will premiere a brand new miniature adaptation of Moby Dick, and Michael Montenegro’s Theatre Zarko will present a new darkly comic work. Chantal Calato will present tiny new work on the heels of her collaboration with Redmoon at the 2009 White House Halloween event. Accomplished puppet designer Meredith Miller, who co-designed puppets for The Snow Queen with Blair Thomas and is currently assisting Basil Twist on the puppets for The Addams Family, is also premiering a new work.

Toy Theater is an elaborate, provocative, arcane and charming form of puppetry inspired by 19th century miniature paper theaters.  These 2-D ‘home versions’ of classic plays were performed as living room entertainments by children and adults and constituted a genuinely populist theater form that were cheap to produce and easy to distribute.  In the 1990’s American artists began delving into toy theater as a way to experiment with scale, dimension, live action animation and “cartoon”.

GREAT SMALL WORKS is a collective of six theater artists--John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi and Mark Sussman--which strives to keep theater at the heart of social life. Drawing on folk, avant-garde, and popular theater traditions to address contemporary issues, the company performs in theaters, clubs, schools, galleries, streets, and other community centers and produces performance works on a wide variety of scales, from outdoor pageants with giant puppets and hundreds of participants, to miniature “toy theater” spectacles.  On any scale, Great Small Works productions seek to renew, cultivate, and strengthen the spirits of their audiences, promoting theater as a model for reanimating the public sphere and participating in democratic life. Veterans of Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater, company members continue the twenty-eight year-old tradition of Spaghetti Dinners, variety evenings that include music, live performance, political discourse, and home-made spaghetti.  They have produced eight international Toy Theater Festivals in New York City, and are planning the ninth festival to take place in June 2010.  Great Small Works is the recipient of an OBIE grant (1997), two UNIMA-USA Citations for Excellence (1997 and 2008), and the Puppeteers of America Jim Henson Award for innovation in puppetry (2006).