Tara Aisha Willis and Olivia Lilley both moved into prominent positions at Chicago institutions within the past two years, but the budgets and physical scale of those institutions could not be more different. Willis is a Hyde Park native whose career in dance and academia took her to New York for a time, before she returned in early 2017 as the associate curator of performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Lilley, who moved to Chicago in 2012 after a stint doing theater in New York, took the reins as artistic director at 38-year-old Prop Thtr in 2018.
For inspiration, each of the directors-devisers were asked to take a source text as a point of departure. Lilley notes that the only requirements for what they chose were that “it had to be in the public domain, and it had to not be a theatrical text. They’re allowed to make whatever they want out of that depending on what their script, quote unquote, looks like.” The points of departure for the creators include Karl Lagerfeld’s obituaries and an early advertisement for a vacuum cleaner. From these seeds, the creators came up with everything from an opera (Dado) to a piece involving 30 schoolchildren on roller skates (Chatman).
Program A (Sydney Chatman, Coya Paz, and Denise Yvette Serna): Sat 9/14-Sun 9/15, noon and 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and Sat 9/21-Sun 9/22, 7 and 8 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Program B (Lucky Stiff, Dado Gyure, and Mikael Burke with April Cleveland): Sat 9/14-Sun 9/15, 7 and 8 PM, MCA, and Sat 9/21-Sun 9/22, noon and 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 312-397-4010, mcachicago.org, $15.
