Goat Island Archive: We have discovered the performance by making it

Exhibition Hall, 4th Floor North

Opening Preview: Friday, March 29, 6–9pm

Throughout the 23 years of its existence (1986–2009), the Chicago-based Goat Island contributed to the conception of nine major performance works, accompanied by publications, film and video projects, workshops, summer schools, lectures and symposia, inventing a complex institution bigger than the individual works. Freed from prescribed narrative and dialog, the work of Goat Island is built slowly in a creative process informed by repetition, chance and individual perception. Their democratic, shared activations continue to influence generations of artists, theatre makers, cultural theorists and social philosophers.

In conjunction with the city's Year of Chicago Theatre, nine national and international performance groups and artists have been commissioned to develop and present new work, each inspired by one of Goat Island's original performances. The works-in-progress will be presented at partner cultural venues throughout Chicago as part of the IN>TIME Festival, and “final” works will take place at the Chicago Cultural Center's Sidney R. Yates Gallery, which will be transformed into a scale re-imagining of the church gymnasium where the collective rehearsed. A tenth performance, created as a composite of “Missing Scenes” from the prior nine works, will be presented in June during a week of concluding events. The accompanying exhibition in the Chicago Cultural Center's Exhibition Hall will present archival materials that reflect Goat Island's generative and pedagogic processes and still invite consideration and reinterpretation.