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Theatre For One: This is a Rehearsal – Final Live Performances

About the program

Chicago Cultural Center

78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL

Daily 10:00 AM-5:00 PM

Theatre for One™ (T41) is a mobile state-of-the-art performance space for one actor and one audience member. Designed by LOT/EK architects, T41 has commissioned over 100 new works by a diverse group of artists. Embracing serendipity, T41 is presented for free in public spaces. Audience members are invited to engage in an intimate theatrical performance which creates a reciprocal energy loop. – Christine Jones, Creator

This fall, in collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, The Poetry Foundation, Floating Museum, and Illinois Humanities, T41 is bringing to Chicago “Theatre for One: This Is A Rehearsal,” a poetic iteration of T41’s most intimate and compelling aspect—the exchange between human beings of meaning, beauty, work, and attention. “This Is A Rehearsal” will feature nine poets presenting newly commissioned works created for the booth, amplifying the power of poetry to dissolve the boundaries that might distance writers from readers, performers from audiences, human beings from human beings. Reading and listening to poems in the privacy of the T41 booth intensifies the intellectual and emotional connections poetry creates; it makes everything, including and especially language itself, shimmer and matter. “Theatre for One: This Is A Rehearsal” will activate poetry, connectivity, and our ability to hear one another in a space made at once for each of us and all of us. – Rachel DeWoskin, Curator

Installation is located in Randolph Square at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Featuring an Audio Installation created by Andrew Schneider

Theatre For One: This Is A Rehearsal is presented by and made by many:
Andrew Schneider
Anne Carson
avery r. young
Bryan Hunt
Christine Jones
CM Burroughs
Helene Achanzar
JC Widman
Jessica Dean Turner
Kelsey Leigh Ervi
kristiana rae colón
M’Reld Green
Mara Isaacs
Maryam Abdi
Michael Francis
Mike Steele
Monty Cole
Nile Lansana
Nita Mendoza
Octopus Theatricals
Rachel Dewoskin
Robert Currie
Roy Kinsey
Sasha Smith
Shara Nova
SRĐA
Sydney Charles
Thomas Dixon
Tina Post
Ydalmi Noriega

Theatre for One: This is a Rehearsal poems were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, and produced by Octopus Theatricals. The project was made possible with generous support from Jeanne Donovan and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation.

 

Venue

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Chicago Cultural Center

Address

78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL

Neighborhood

The Loop

Description

The Chicago Cultural Center serves as one of the main exhibition venue sites for CAB 5, featuring projects from more than 80 participants from ten countries. 

Opened in 1897, the Chicago Cultural Center is a Chicago landmark building operated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and is home to free cultural exhibits and programming year-round.

Chicago Cultural Center
Chicago Cultural Center

Participant

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Theatre For One

New York, United States

Website

Theatre for One is a mobile state-of-the-art performance space for one actor and one audience member. Conceived by Artistic Director Christine Jones and designed by LOT-EK architects, Theater for One commissions new work created specifically for this venue’s one-to-one relationship. Embracing serendipity and spontaneity, Theatre for One is presented in public spaces in which audience members are invited to engage in an intimate theatrical exchange and enter the theatre space not knowing what to expect. Actor and audience member encounter each other as strangers in this suspended space and, through the course of the performance allow the divisions and distinctions that separate us to dissolve. Since its inception, Theater for One, in collaboration with its presenting partners, has commissioned 75 new works, by established as well as emerging writers.

Participant

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LOT-EK, "Theater for One," Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Photo: Cory Dewald

LOT-EK

New York, United States

Website

LOT-EK is a team of architects, thinkers, and makers. They gather around their love of people and objects—all things made, seen, unseen, dismissed. LOT-EK upcycles and works with the ordinary. LOT-EK’s team is a tight group of designers who bring their diverse voices, sensibilities, and heritages to this common project. The team’s founding partners, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, work in New York; grew up in Naples, Italy; teach at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; and have been practicing together since 1993. LOT-EK’s work has been recognized by awards and accolades from the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices to the American Institute of Architects New York chapter Honor Awards, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. LOT-EK’s second monograph, with Thomas de Monchaux is O+O: Objects + Operations.

The City is the Site