The LookOut Curatorial Residency offers an opportunity for an up-and-coming Chicago practitioner to curate a series of four performances over a two weekends of the LookOut series. These performances can encompass any live genre and form. We encourage the resident to approach these performances as a unit, placing them in conversation with one another in a way we do not normally program work into the series.

Once the artists are selected to be a part of the series the LookOut team takes on the role of producing the program, allowing the Curatorial Resident to continue to be in conversation with the artists and on the context surrounding the month of programming.

WORK AROUND

CURATED BY KARA BRODY & AMANDA MARAIST
FEBRUARY 04 - FEBRUARY 12, 2023

For the launch of the curatorial residency program curators Kara Brody & Amanda Maraist chose to spotlight three movements makers in a series titled: work around. Built from a need for more support towards creative processes, work around aimed to redirect the desire for finished products by allocating resources towards developmental stages of artists’ work. This two-week series amplified the process of three exceptional Chicago-based dance artists – Cat Mahari, Tuli Bera and Drew Lewis. With 40+ hours of rehearsal space, each artist will dream up an iteration of their in-progress work for a two-weekend showcase.

BLK ARK: THE IMPOSSIBLE MANIFESTATION (WORK IN PROGRESS
BY CAT MAHARI
FEBRUARY 4 & 5

BANGALI MEYE
BY TULI BERA
FEBRUARY 9 & 10

HEAVY OBJECTS
BY DREW LEWIS
FEBRUARY 11 & 12

MERGE

CURATED BY HELEN LEE
MARCH 28 - APRIL 6, 2024

For the second iteration of the curatorial residency program, Helen Lee curated a series entitled MERGE, colliding musicians and dancers in unexpected configurations for two programs of work. MERGE was a portal into the works of various movement and sound artists from all walks of life. Each program moved like a concert with an opening gesture followed by a headlining performance. Together these pairings collided creating a world where the entanglements of the chaotic and harmonious facets of dance and music can offer us a place to ruminate, delight and sometimes heal.

PROGRAM ONE: HANNAH MARCUS & MITSU SALMON
This program begans with Hannah Marcus performing bones fragile, a movement and live sound looping piece that explores moments of infiniteness, tenderness, and memory. Afterwards artist Mitsu Salmon drew from her own family history, voice, and geology in her work Desert Turtle.

PROGRAM TWO: FREEDOM FROM AND FREEDOM TO & KINNARI VORA
Freedom From and Freedom To, led by Cristal Sabbagh, invites a pair of movement and sound improvisors from across Chicago to gather in front of a live audience, where they are grouped by chance. Artist Kinnari Vora dived into ritual with her piece Kissing The Earth, an offering to the ancestors who lived and breathed and at the same time are alive within us.

DREAM DEVIS

CURATED BY ABHIJEET
APRIL 4 - 13 

For the third iteration of the residency we wanted to try something different. Drag is such an essential art form in Chicago and exploring alternative venues has been a vital way to expand its reach. We partnered with Abhijeet to bring drag into our theater with a brand new project titled Dream Devis.

Dream Devis is a joyously queer celebration of the feminine archetypes that have cast an enduring spell on the cultural imagination through their fascinating, frustrating, singular presence in Indian popular cinema and music.

A collective of South Asian femme performers, musicians, film buffs and visual artists have come together under the curatorial guidance of noted Chicago drag queen and artist Abhijeet (@bon_abhijeet) to combine drag, burlesque, live music, video and design with the ambition of illustrating a canon of familiar iconography that has inspired filmmaking, fashion and the feminine experience across South Asia and the diaspora (and, increasingly, beyond) – as well as subverting it via an intentionally queer and trans lens by recreating not only the histories of these Devis but also the Devis they birthed and nurtured within us, the artists behind this show.

Picture the chiffon-wrapped romance of The Ingenue, the tongue-in-cheek defiance of The Rulebreaker, the tear-soaked travails of The Mother, the smoke-scented schemes of The Vamp, the prurient allure of The Item Girl, the opulent heartbreak of The Courtesan, and the mind-bending spectacle of The Superhuman, brought to life via a dizzying combination of tribute and send-up. 

We have conceived these beloved figures in a series of set pieces that evoke the style of the stereotypical Bollywood movie of a bygone era, replete with big emotions, big costumes, big tonal shifts, and, of course, big song and dance numbers; but rendered intimate and accessible in a unique limited-run theatrical experience.

PRESS

Invitations: Steppenwolf Makes Space for Process in “Work Around” Series - NEWCITY
LOOK OUT//WORK AROUND: artistic reflections with Cat Mahari, Tuli Bera, and Drew Lewis - Performance Response Journal
work around series curated by Kara Brody & Amanda Maraist for Steppenwolf’s LookOut Series - Performance Response Journal
and they love: a response by J’Sun Howard - Performance Response Journal
Gray days, but vibrant stages - Chicago Reader
Sound and movement in MERGE - Chicago Reader
Abhijeet follows their Dream Devis at Steppenwolf - Windy City Times