Reasons For Moving

Starting August 9, Striding Lion InterArts Workshop will bring together an array of choreographers, dancers, theatre practitioners and musicians for its two-week festival, Reasons for Moving. Striding Lion’s Sixth Annual InterArts Festival, consisting of three multi-disciplinary pieces nightly, will also feature a workshop with Goat Island, a performance from the company’s apprentice program, and a Storytellers musician event.

"All of the pieces are a meditation on the question implicit in the theme: why do we move?" said Striding Lion Artistic Director Amanda Berg Wilson. "What ties the pieces together is their meditation on the theme, as well as their use of multiple performance forms."

Is it Theatre? Dance? What?
Striding Lion developed the festival as a response to the fact that there is a type of performance that is not performance art, nor musical theatre, nor modern dance, "that is difficult to categorize but incredibly important to the evolution of live performance." The company’s aesthetic has been defined by the collaboration of artists of multiple disciplines that produce performances that exists in the intersection where theatre, music and dance meet. The Annual InterArts Festival celebrates those artists creating work in this inter-section, and caters to audiences eager for performance, which is simultaneously kinetic, sonic and progressive, rather than based on one storytelling form, Berg Wilson explained.

"While there are many wonderful theatre, dance, and music festivals here in Chicago, there are few that present pieces in which these performance forms happen simultaneously," she says. "We invite audiences into a space where they can see what live performance can become when the performers are using movement, text, and music, all at once."

This festival celebrates not only the community that Striding Lion has created among artists who wish to collaborate across disciplinary lines, but also between their artist-teachers and students (in featuring our apprentice's performances with our professional performers on the same night); and between performing groups who are making this kind of work, Berg Wilson explained.

About the pieces
The Festival will feature the titular entry from festival organizer Striding Lion InterArts Workshop, as well as "Fancydom" by parker (sic) and "The Jenkins Farm Project" by Annie Arnoult Beserra. In addition to the three featured performances and "Freakie Outie," a nightly live lobby installation by parker (sic), the Reasons for Moving Festival will feature many official and unofficial gatherings between participating artists and audience, including an August 12 afternoon (1-4 p.m.) workshop conducted by guest artists from performance group Goat Island and an August 12 evening (8 p.m.) "storytellers" music night in which singer/songwriters elaborate on the stories behind their songs. Also on August 11, the work of Striding Lion's summer apprentices (through the After School Matters program) will be featured as part of the regular 8 p.m. show.

The titular piece, Reasons for Moving "revolves around movement as it relates to our attempts at self-discovery and the discovery of others," according to Berg Wilson, while Fancydom revolves around movement as it relates to celebrities and icons whom we consider "fancy" and Jenkins Farm Project as it relates to the evolution of a family from a specific space in our country, and outward. Additionally, says Berg Wilson,  "our apprentices have been mediating on movement as it related to the achievement of dreams and reaching towards the future."

Reasons for Moving will perform Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. at National Pastime Theater located at 4139 N. Broadway. Tickets are $15 and can be reserved by calling 773-561-0494.