Performance artist Karen Finley and playwright Ike Holter are among the artists included in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s LookOut series, the company’s new multi-genre performance series that presents a variety of work from a diverse array of voices, both emerging and established.
Stay Lit by Ike Holter will play December 9-10 at 10 PM. According to Steppenwolf, the piece is “a short play mash up of new work by Ike Holter focusing on a group of people who will do whatever they can to stay focused, driven, on the edge and slipping into spiral. Songs, monologues and scenes with a dynamite cast and music by John Cicora.”
Read WHY IKE HOLTER HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO TELL CHICAGO STORIES
Finley will have two works play in February 2017: a solo spoken-word piece entitled Written in Sand; and Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, which explores the recent heightened U.S. political presidential landscape.
Written in Sand will play February 10-11 at 8 PM. Here’s how the performance is billed: “For Visual Aids 25th anniversary (2013), curated by Sur Rodney Sur in New York City, Karen Finley was invited to participate in the exhibit. While looking over and revisiting her art and writing on the subject and era Finley gathered her poetic responses and realized that it became its own narrative, its own body of work. Sections of performance texts, poetry, letters and fragments express the loss and magnitude of personal suffering and compassion within a larger world of homophobia, denial and injustice. Some of these writings are those that were censored and considered indecent, bringing her and three other artists (Fleck, Hughes, Miller) to the Supreme Court.”
Unicorn Gratitude Mystery will play February 17-18 at 8 PM. The piece, according to press notes, “takes on citizenship, gender disparity and abuse of power. The individual price of public relationships at the price of privacy becomes divisive with searing psychosexual dynamics of wit and seething revelation. The performance explores magical beings, aggressive thankfulness and collective intimacy through Shakespearean sudden trauma. This is an experimental nonlinear poetic text that creates a jolt of intuition, analysis and unnatural disaster of the human kind.”
For more information and the full LookOut series lineup, click here.
