In a world of binaries and borders, how does art create sanctuary? Chicago Home Theater Festival ( CHTF ) invites strangers into each other's homes to share a communal meal, experience transformative art, and build intentional community across lines of difference. Spend an evening in the home of lifelong activists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and explore Kenwood through intersections of Black magic including jazz, textiles, and ritual performance.
Experience immigrant and refugee narratives through gardening, dance, and an artist-led block party in the Albany Park home of theater director Giau Minh Truong. Investigate the meaning of given and chosen family with deejay performance, spoken word poetry, and youth theater in the home of WBEZ reporter and The South Side author Natalie Moore. Gather at rapper-poet Mykele DeVille's Pilsen collective Eco for a night of radical nourishment, immersive installation, performance, and soundscape engaging issues of forced migration and gentrification.
CHTF centers the leadership of women and femmes, artists of color, immigrants and refugees, LGBTQ folks, and artists with disabilities whose creative practice disrupts injustice and paves cultural safe passages across our hyper-segregated city. CHTF believes in a holistic approach to accessibility with consideration to physical ability, mental health, as well as community safety. To this end CHTF has embarked on a Neighborhood Field Guide Project in partnership with Hyde Park Art Center PUBLIC SCHOOL exhibition, Sixty Inches from Center, City Bureau, Chicago Park District, and StoryCorps to document cultural organizing practices and untold neighborhood stories. Field Guides featuring oral histories, maps, collages, interviews, and community journalism will be featured online and distributed as zines each night of the festival.
2017 SCHEDULE
MAY 14 / BRONZEVILLE
MAY 16 / EAST GARFIELD PARK *wheelchair accessible
MAY 18 / KENWOOD
MAY 19 / HUMBOLDT PARK *wheelchair accessible
MAY 20 / ROGERS PARK
MAY 21 / HYDE PARK
MAY 22 / ENGLEWOOD *wheelchair accessible
MAY 23 / PILSEN
MAY 24 / LITTLE VILLAGE
MAY 25 / BRONZEVILLE *wheelchair accessible
MAY 26 / ALBANY PARK
MAY 27 / SOUTH SHORE
MAY 28 / AUSTIN
MAY 29 / EDGEWATER *wheelchair accessible
MISSION
Chicago Home Theater Festival ( CHTF ) invites strangers into each other's homes to share a communal meal, experience transformative art, and build intentional community across lines of difference. CHTF centers the leadership of women and femmes, artists of color, immigrants and refugees, LGBTQ folks, and artists with disabilities whose creative practice disrupts injustice and paves cultural safe passages across our hyper-segregated city.
HISTORY
The International Home Theater Festival was founded by Philip Huang in 2010 as a way to reclaim domestic space as a forum for cultural organizing. Launched in Berkeley, California it has since been produced in over a dozen countries across numerous continents. In the United States, The Chicago Home Theater Festival is the only organized effort to fulfill this mission while also addressing specific issues facing its home city. The Chicago Home Theater launched in 2012 by founding producers Irina Zadov, Blake Russell, and Laley Lippard with an intention to disrupt historically entrenched race and class divides and continues to re-imagine safety and accessibility. The arts have been at the heart of Chicago's labor, immigration, civil rights, and other movements for justice and liberation. Inspired to continue this legacy, and once again put artists at the forefront of social change, CHTF founding producers endeavored to re-route Chicago's creative maps by way of radical generosity.
