Chicago Performs: September 18–21, 2025

Experience one weekend of groundbreaking performances by Chicago artists.

Chicago Performs returns to the MCA for its fourth year with a four-day festival of dynamic, electrifying performances by artists Robyn Mineko Williams & Artists, Helen Lee/Momentum Sensorium, and Red Clay Dance Company. Taking place within and outside of the museum’s walls, this annual festival of performance puts the wealth of revelatory live arts made by the Chicago creative community front and center, inviting a small cohort of local artists to share new performance works, including those developed through the MCA’s In Progress series and New Works Initiative.

Chicago Performs supports artists who are entering a new phase of their practice—whether stepping onto a larger stage for the first time, exploring new directions, or expanding the scale of their projects—and offers the public an unprecedented chance to witness the city’s groundbreaking performance artists in action.

In 2025, three movement-based artists explore themes of remembrance and grief to make space for joy and healing. At a social and politcal moment of heightened turmoil and precarity, these works offer somatic rituals for reflection, celebration, survival, and reprieve. Robyn Mineko Williams creates a new cinematic dance piece with live music and shadow puppetry that considers the imprints we make on those we encounter.  Red Clay Dance Company, led by Vershawn Sanders Ward, envisions a utopia for Black girls in new work with an altar to missing and murdered Black women and girls at its center. Finally, choreographer and somatic guide Helen Lee offers a series of participatory workshops featuring sound bowls, a walking meditation from the MCA to the lake, and a communal meal shared with an intimate audience for those curious to explore techniques for processing grief.

Chicago Performs is organized by Laura Paige Kyber, Assistant Curator of Performance.