Join us for Links Hall’s 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works, two groundbreaking weekends of new performance and public events. Representing some of the most talented makers in Chicago from dance, performance art, installation, and performance as social practice, six artists present works developed while in-residence at Links during the 2023-2024 season. Featured artists include: Links Hall Residents AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi, and Fellows Najee-Zaid Searcy and Lani T. Montreal.
Tickets are available on a sliding scale from $16-$42.
Events in the 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works
June 21 at 7pm | Fall Residents: AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi
June 22 at 7pm | Spring Fellow: Lani T. Montreal
June 23 at 7pm | Spring Fellow: Lani T. Montreal
June 28 at 7pm | Spring Fellow: Najee-Zaid Searcy
June 29 at 7pm | Spring Fellow: Najee-Zaid Searcy
June 30 at 7pm | Fall Residents: AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi
Program Notes
AiRos 頌恩 medill’s ZÌRÁN // 自然 | in {sharing} my solitude
metal. earth. fire. wood. water
grief. worry. joy. anger. wisdom
is a series of {7} gathered movements from songs that have come through to me since 2018 mapping my travel through the aftermath of remembering. i spent much time alone- recalculating-listening- expressing -& Billie Holiday's solitude played on repeat. i would greet the earth daily, witnessed & held. so now i share this ritual to be witnessed weaving in of others in rebuilding.
this iteration is the beginning of this sharing
Jamila Kekulah’s Lay Your Burdens Down: Commune
Prayer is the unseen labor that extends beyond time and location. Prayer wraps us up in wisdom, in love, in care, in concern, in protection; offered from the many souls who wish it so.
We begin in the lobby.
Prayer cards will be offered for you to extend a prayer/intention. They will be collected and read aloud in the collective.
(ex.1 For T.J experiencing difficulty | ex.2 for myself, in need of support…)
Collaborator: Isabelle Taylor
Music/Sound: “Spirit Call” (SAULT); “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Jacob Collier, John Legend, and Tori Kelly); “Agape” (Nicholas Britell); “Lay My Burdens Down” (Billy Preston); “Total Praise” (Sunday Service Choir)
Eshan Rafi’s shuru karein (let us begin)
Inhabiting the present political moment, I look backwards and forwards in time. I explore the relationship between making art, doing politics, and the possibility of history. I fold in an interview with my father; appropriate and enact a speech by Harry S. Truman to Congress; and use an opening title track to map questions in space.
Lani T. Montreal’s Anak ni Tapia: Leaving Mother
Anak ni Tapia: Leaving Mother is a story about what it's like for someone to grow up in the shadow of a celebrity mother with a dark past in a patriarchal and deeply religious society.
Collaborators: Daisy Castro (Director) and Nejla Yatkin (Movement Coach)
Music/Sound: Demetrio Cardona-Maguigad & Michael Querubin
Special Thanks: Evanthia Georges, Joanah Torre, Alexa Bermudez, Ava Bermudez, Christina Luis Bermudez, Cameron Barrett Bermudez, Melanya Liwanag Aguila, and the Links Hall Team
Najee-Zaid Searcy’s Emersion
Emersion releases that which must be shed. Allowing that which must become through movement, space, scent, and form. Emersion seeks to allow for personal and collective transformation by offering meditations and wellness services when possible. We are conduits reactivating the bodymind, and participating with the energies present.
Collaborators: Alejandro Salazar (Musician), Paige Brown (Musician), and Viktor Le-Givens (Movement and Installation)
Music/Sound: Composed by Najee-Zaid
Special Thanks: Given to my ancestors, family, friends, those who have supported me, and the Links Hall team.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Artist Bios
AiRos 頌恩 medill is a yellow hapa nonbinary trans Taiwanese american circle keeper, care worker, storyteller, facilitator, bodyworker, and culture bearer who is moving to organize abundance in the ecology of home. AiRos practices with the 5 elements (water, wood, fire, metal, earth) to align bodies to heaven and earth in reciprocity and reverence of feeling and the distribution of energies. As part of the diaspora air has a lifelong practice of traveling, moving through and shifting culture.
Jamila Kekulah is ever evolving. They are a mover, an observer, a movement creator, a lifelong learner, and a deep listener of the body. Jamila is interested in investigating how we inhabit ourselves and each other in this human experience.
Eshan Rafi is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, expanded photography, and video. Their works deal with the intersection of political events and personal archives, often staging the impossibility of representation. Their work has been exhibited, performed, and screened internationally including at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto; Sharjah Film Platform; M:ST 9 Performance Art Biennale, Calgary; and neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. Rafi holds an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston.
Lani T. Montreal is a queer feminist Filipina writer, educator, and performer based in Chicago. Her plays have been read and produced in the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines, mostly by CIRCA-Pintig Filipino-American Theatre Group. Likewise, her essays and poetry have been published in journals and anthologies, among them LitBop Magazine, Rattle, MiPoesias, Riksha and others. Lani writes to create her home in the diaspora. She is currently a Chicago Dramatist Network Playwright, was a Resident Artist at Free Street Theater (2017), two-time recipient of 3Arts Residency Awards (2016 and 2009), and a 2017 alumni of VONA Writers of Color Workshop.
Najee-Zaid Searcy is a Chicago born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance and identity. Najee-Zaid uses their background in music, facilitation, and informal arts learning to explore the intersection of space and identity within the context of healing modalities through his new body of work “Immersion” which received its debut at Elastic Arts late 2022. Najee-Zaid’s latest works combine elemental and plant ancestries with the human experience while hybridizing his performance acoustically, electronically, and spatially with a range of accessible sensory activations. Learn more at najeezaidsearcy.com.
Collaborators
Alyssa Vera Ramos (ZìRán // 自然) (she/her/ella) is a Boricua devising artist, theatre director, cultural strategist, and blossoming intimacy director dedicated to dreaming and practicing a liberated world. Her artistic work includes shaping many collaboratively written, often participatory plays, and explores themes of reproductive and racial justice and getting in right relationship with ancestors and each other. Alyssa is a curator of Swarm Artist Residency and a student at La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón.
Crystle LiWayway Diño (ZìRán // 自然) is a Pinay Chicago native guided by her passions in the visual, performance, and healing arts rooted in community and her cultural upbringings. She unearths herstory and investigates time, place, and relation by incorporating elements of the body, participation, and memory and by creating movement using repetition in patterns immersed in personal stories, collective experiences, and folklore. She practices as a folk art therapist, performance and visual artist, mover & dancer, cultural worker, and youth development worker. She embodies her freedom by training in Filipino Martial Arts and dance and utilizes the concepts of Chicago House culture of freedom, love, and empowerment, as well as the Babaylan consciousness as foundation and impetus for her practices.
Daisy Castro (Anak ni Tapia: Leaving Mother) has been involved in Chicago theatre for 25+ years both on and off stage as a dancer, performer, tech hand, administrator, producer and director. She was part of the second generation of Stir-Friday Night! as writer, actor and development coordinator. In 1991, she was cast as the love interest of Carlos Bulosan in Pintig Theatre group's maiden production, America's in the Heart. This started her long, complicated, and fulfilling relationship with the organization. What a privilege to witness its evolution from concept to the present incarnation.
Demetrio P. Maguigad (Anak ni Tapia: Leaving Mother) is a multidisciplinary experience designer and strategist. He is a longtime music producer and sound designer to CIRCA Pintig theatrical and musical productions including Mr & Mrs Laquesta Go Dancing, Sister Outlaw, Game of Trolls, and most recently Daryo's All American Diner. He was the Principal and Director of Design Strategy at LimeRed, and now founder and owner of Polyrhythmic Design & Co.
Michael Querubin (Anak ni Tapia: Leaving Mother) is a musician who has collaborated on a few productions with the community theatre group, Circa-Pintig. He is also a member of the Bagwis Collective, a Chicago based progressive Filipino fusion band.
Alejandro Salazar emphasizes love, peace, and unity to audiences through unique performances, education, and the cultural study of Afro-Cuban and Black-American Music. Chicago’s own rising star, Alejandro Salazar, is deeply rooted in the tradition, yet he likes to explore new ways to help people groove and dance more to his infectious swing feel. Alejandro has had the pleasure of playing at clubs, venues, and festivals all over Chicago and the world like The Chicago Jazz Festival, Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Jazz a la Villette (Paris), Primavera Sound Barcelona, Munch Museum (Oslo), Bourse de Commerce (Paris), Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, The Jazz Showcase, Andy’s Jazz Club, DuSable Museum, The Green Mill, Constellation, and Dorian's to name a few.
A vocalist, pianist and composer, Paige Brown still sometimes lovingly refers to herself as "arts-adjacent" while establishing herself as an artist in her own right. As a Performing Arts Residency Coordinator and as a fan/friend of many in the robust Chicago arts ecosystem, she constantly finds herself in awe of the talent and adventurousness of the creatives she is privileged to witness and support. While she more frequently positions herself contently in the audiences of performances and exhibitions, she is currently navigating a journey of strengthening the inner mechanisms and communal connections to deepen and externalize her own practice more fully. She currently finds joy/peace by communing with plants and other beings, and catalyzing/witnessing the growth of artists and others. She currently finds challenge in her quest to improve at the art of taking things slow, and in reacquainting herself with the simple, playful practices that attracted her to Music, her first love.
Viktor Le-Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site specific public rituals. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre and post modern spiritual theologies, le. Givens hopes to extend and reimagine the folk customs of his family . His material archive is comprised of the forgotten and discarded household items found during excavations of East Texas, Louisiana, Havana Cuba and Mexico City. Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts , le. Givens. seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual memory.