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Kayleigh Butcher is a founding member of former High Concept Labs Sponsored Artists Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. They perform Morton Feldman’s Three Voices on Thursday, August 6 at HCL. Three Voices is a sublime piece that both mesmerizes and stupefies. The length, the tunings, the melismas, textures, the range, the relentlessness—it’s challenging in a way that … Continue reading
Mitsu Salmon is a Spring 2015 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Labs. See other posts by Mitsu Salmon > I hear about my great grandfather through my grandfather and my mother. I have never met him. Different family members paint a picture of this man. The stories are distorted, romanticized, vague, clear. How does his story … Continue reading
Nora Sharp is a High Concept Labs Sponsored Artist with Vaudeo Motion. The other day I was playing hide and seek with my girlfriend Ginette’s three-year-old niece. Little Marie is at the age where her human-ness seems to grow exponentially: each day she possesses more words, more enunciation, more awareness of the relationships of people around her. … Continue reading
By Sponsored Artist Andrea Cerniglia of Dropshift Dance It was an extraordinarily busy May. Not only had I been working in the HCL studios with fellow dropshift dancer, Julie Brannen, developing a new duet to be premiered with Luke Gullickson‘s musical work Open, but I had been in the final stages of production for dropshift’s recent evening length production, … Continue reading
by Sponsored Artist Luke Gullickson We are all aware that there exists a state called “Wyoming,” but what is it, really, to “wyome”? Consider: Wyoming ranks tenth among the states in area, and fiftieth in population. About 584,000 people live there: that is roughly the populace of Des Moines, stretched across a hundred thousand square … Continue reading
Guest blogger Eleanor Russell is a PhD candidate in Theatre at Northwestern University. What does the dancing body know? How does it come to know it? The question of knowledge production and ways of knowing took center stage on May 9th at Cultural Conversations: Dance + Dramaturgy, sponsored by High Concept Labs and Chicago Dancemakers Forum. … Continue reading
Author, editor, and Spring 2015 Sponsored Artist Emma Morris is the co-creator (with musician David Safran) of The Hotwife of Hyde Park, a comedy horror musical in development this summer. Maul Tirade, the “Hotwife,” is a one-woman review committee traveling to an administrative housing project for washed-up, obsolete, and deranged Chicago artists. These characters, along with Maul’s unraveling romantic … Continue reading
by guitarist Samuel Rowe of Fonema Consort Acoustic guitarists are placed in a rather awkward situation: the instrument is simultaneously an emblem of triumphant machismo, and one of the most delicate, quiet members of the string instrument family. There is a remarkable symbolic gap between the guitar’s aura of phallic heroism and its objective diminutiveness—it is not … Continue reading
Spring 2015 Sponsored Artist, David Safran, is the composer and co-author of The Hotwife of Hyde Park, a sensationally bloody satire written with fellow Spring 2015 Sponsored Artist, Emma Morris. Ahead of the show’s previews set for this summer, David met up with theatrical producer, Brooke Gilbert, to discuss the musical, feminist icons, after-parties with Alan Alda, … Continue reading
by Sponsored Artist Mitsu Salmon Two weekends ago, I showed a 20-minute version of my developing work Tsuchi for the Chicago Post-Butoh Festival. It was an amazing and beautiful experience. What follows are some thoughts on creating and performing Tsuchi. My great grandfather, Tomohiro, emigrated from Okinawa to Honolulu, Hawaii. He was a pineapple farmer. A pineapple … Continue reading
by Sponsored Artist Andrea Cerniglia Process in the studio starts with ritual—we arrive, connect, and then create. Each part of the process informs the next, even if everything done in the spirit of experimentation does not make it into the final piece. The trial and error of “doing” cues how we shape and further develop construct … Continue reading
By former Sponsored Artist Andy North Hello! I’m Andy North. I was a sponsored artist with High Concept Labs last summer, designing big physical games. On May 2nd, hcl is hosting a performance of my newest game, called Double Danger Room. Double Danger Room is a storytelling game. It’s like participatory theatre, though you don’t participate by … Continue reading
by Sponsored Artist Nora Sharp of Vaudeo Motion While developing a unified performance ensemble over the past two and half months at High Concept Labs, Vaudeo Motion has also been taking steps to understand our roles and goals as they relate to our audience. In doing so, we keep returning to questions of non-verbal communication … Continue reading
by Ralph Upton, co-creator of For Your Future Guidance by Binge Culture Collective When we drop our rental car off in Chicago before our final touring performance of For Your Future Guidance at High Concept Labs, it will be time to give sincere thanks to our mobile phones. Our phones guided us through all these unfamiliar streets … Continue reading
Summer Sponsored 2014 Artist Andy North discusses his ideas about playing games and what it teaches us. I’m a game designer. When we think of games we think of kids, and when we think of kids’ games we think of screaming and chaos. But If you’ve ever watched very young children play you’ll see that … Continue reading
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