Pivot Arts Festival

Event Type
Festival

 

Announcing the 6th Annual Pivot Arts Festival, an all-out celebration of genre-defying performance! This year’s festival features the Chicago premiere of Austin Texas-based theatre collective Rude Mechs along with a lineup of top artistic innovators in music, dance, and theater from Chicago and beyond. Get a Festival Pass and see three shows for only $40! Tickets on sale now!


The Pivot Arts Festival is an annual celebration of innovative performance throughout Chicago’s Uptown & Edgewater neighborhoods. Over ten days, audiences have the opportunity to experience unique music, theater, dance, puppetry, all ages shows, comedy, discussions and more. The purpose of the festival is to create a culture of innovative performance works in Chicago, to bring diverse people together through the arts, and to contribute to the economic vitality of the Uptown and Edgewater neighborhoods.

In 2013 we produced our first festival whose theme was “Reigniting the Vaudeville Era in Uptown and Edgewater.” We had top notch Chicago groups like Mucca Pazza, a twenty-eight piece punk marching band; Manual Cinema; Theater Oobleck; Mad Shak Dance; RE Dance and many others including an entire weekend of “Art in the Parking Lot” — free performances in an empty parking lot in Uptown. We converted an empty bank building that had been originally built as a vaudeville theater into a performance space and used multiple historic buildings.

In 2014 the festival theme was “Art Meets Science” and we curated multiple shows around science themes from the Acoustics of House (a house music dance party) to the Seldoms’ Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead (a dance piece about climate change) the festival showcased multiple performances including Akayo Kato’s The Incidents which was listed as one of the Top Ten Dance Performances by the Chicago Tribune.

The festival’s partnership with Loyola University has broadened the type of work we are able to program thanks to the use of their beautiful Mundelein Center for the Arts. In 2015 the Pivot Arts Festival included our first-ever “Celebrate Community!” Parade along with multiple dance and theater performances from Lucky Plush Productions to Dean Evans’ Honeybuns.

In 2016 we moved away from an annual theme and instead focused solely on the “Pivot Arts Festival” as a celebration of unique and innovative works. The festival continued to promote local businesses with performances occurring inside businesses and unusual spaces as well as at more traditional performance venues.