Chicago Performs | Every house has a door, Broken Aquarium

Director | Lin Hixson

Dramaturg and Writer | Matthew Goulish

Costumes and Textiles | Essi Kausalainen

Producer and Manager | Sarah Skaggs

Technical Director | Christine Shallenberg

Performers and Co-devisers | Alex Bradley Cohen, Elise Cowin, Isaac Cresswell, Kenya Kao Ra Zen Fulton, Matthew Goulish, Essi Kausalainen, Tim Kinsella, Jenny Polus, and Corey Smith

Non-performing Co-deviser | Bryan Saner

Music/Sound | Composed and performed by Tim Kinsella & Jenny Polus

Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturg, formed Every house has a door in 2008 to convene diverse, intergenerational, project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house has a door creates performance works and performance-related projects in many media. Based in Chicago, the company presents work for local, national, and international audiences. Longstanding leaders in Chicago’s performance community, Hixson and Goulish have mentored generations of young artists through the performance department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their former collective, Goat Island, which toured works internationally from the mid 1980s to 2007.

Essi Kausalainen’s works operate through performance, textile, text, audio, and video. Collaborating with plants and fungi, artists, musicians, plant biologists, and children, Kausalainen’s work approaches the body as an open-ended process made in, and shaped by, complex relations with other beings, situations, and environments. Her work has been exhibited and performed in venues such as Kiasma, HAM, Inkonst (Malmö, Sweden), Somerset House Studios in London, Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden), and Moderna Museet Malmö.

Alex Bradley Cohen lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Recent exhibitions include Scenes from the Collection, the Jewish Museum, New York; Love & Anarchy, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York; See/Think/Shape, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and Triple: Alex Bradley Cohen, Louis Fratino, and Tschabalala Self, University Art Museum at the University of Albany, New York. Other exhibitions have been held at SULK, Chicago, Illinois; the Luggage Store, San Francisco, California; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, Illinois; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York; and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, California, among others. Cohen received his MFA from Northwestern University in 2020 and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. His work can be found in the public collections of the Jewish Museum, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Elise Cowin is an independent dancer and choreographer. Her work has been supported by Individual Artist Program grants from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and residencies through High Concept Labs, the Bridge/IN>TIME Performance Festival, Links Hall (Chicago, Illinois) and Centro Teatrale di Ricerca (Venice, Italy). She has shown work locally at Defibrillator Gallery, Mana Contemporary, High Concept Labs, the Studebaker Theatre, the Arts Club, Links Hall, and Watershed Art & Ecology. Cowin first worked with Every house has a door in 2017 and has since performed with them at the New Performance Biennale in Turku, Finland, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, the Arts Club of Chicago, and in other contexts. A few current and past collaborators include Josh Hoglund, Joanna Furnans, and Julia Pello. She and Pello premiered a film in competition at FIDMarseille International Film Festival in June. Dance Magazine named Cowin one of “25 to Watch” in 2017. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is full-time faculty in Dance and Humanities at Harold Washington, one of the City Colleges of Chicago.

Isaac Cresswell was born in France and has lived in Chicago for the past 10 years. Isaac is in 6th grade, speaks three languages, and is a keen learner of all that life can offer. Isaac has been performing yearly with Every house has a door since 2020 and has thoroughly enjoyed working with Lin and Matthew, as well as every member of the company.

Kenya “Kao Ra Zen” Fulton is a spoken-word poet, rapper, multimedia performance artist, painter, director, and curator born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. For several years, he has performed and organized concerts, parties, film screenings, and art happenings throughout Chicago, notably his annual HIPPY HOLY DAZE art and music holiday celebrations; KULTURE KLASH art film/video showcases; and the A PERFORMANCE HAPPENING series. Kao has performed and exhibited in Germany, rocked open MICs in Guatemala, and was a feature performer during events such as the first annual Afro Utah Festival in 2021, the Chicago Hip-Hop Theater Fest and TEDx Showtime ChiTime events in 2022, and the New Performance Turku Biennale in Finland in 2023. Kao’s creative writing has been published in numerous poetry collections, magazines, and websites. Kao is a member of International Art Group artist collective; the legendary Nacrobats Hip-Hop crew; and was a member of the Firqit Surayah dance troupe. Kao has an Associate of Fine Arts degree from Harold Washington College, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is now in the MFA Creative Writing program at Chicago State University. He has released several music videos and is currently working on multiple music-related projects.

Tim Kinsella makes music with his wife Jenny Pulse for the Kill Rock Stars label. Past projects include the bands Joan of Arc, Owls, and assorted cross-disciplinary stuff and things.

Jennifer Polus aka “Jenny Pulse” is a musician, producer, performer, and painter based in Chicago. Her solo project reinterprets and pays homage to club, pop, and industrial music of the 1980s and 1990s. For the past seven years she has focused on the collaboration with her husband, Tim Kinsella, an interdisciplinary approach to music considering aesthetics, history, politics, and being people enmeshed in the local and national music scene. Their second record on Kill Rock Stars will be released in early 2025. She is also part of the bluesy avant-garde musical collective “Who is the Witness?” She is a Scorpio.

Bryan Saner‘s practice includes industrial arts, architectural restoration, sculpture, and performance. He has made his living as a small business owner doing a combination of those disciplines. Saner tries to make long-term commitments to collaborate closely with artists and creative practitioners in developing alternative lifestyles, workplaces, and economic communities. He works both in and outside of existing established systems. The connection between making, building, and performing is central to his creative practice. Each discipline participates in the goals of each other’s without separation. They are socially active practices. We live, learn, create, and congregate in private and public architectural spaces, theoretical institutions, and human bodies. These practices endeavor to advance culture by building, destroying, rebuilding, and refining human spaces, objects, thought, and relationships.

Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer from Chicago, Illinois. Their work has been seen at Steppenwolf Theater, Hyde Park Art Center, the Mattress Factory, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Chicago International Puppet Festival, and the Bath Fringe Festival. Their work has been featured by Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, and the Chicago Reader. Smith is an avid collaborator and has worked with artists such as Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, Doreen Chan, and Rough House Puppet Theater Company. They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Christine Shallenberg is a teaching artist and mom. Her work ranges in mode from electronic textiles to light and sound installations to participatory choreographies for audiences (and sometimes her child). Her long-time collaboration with Jenn Cooper, JCSpaceRadio, engaged in a casually critical dialogue with frequencies through workshops, performances, and interactive installations. Her work has been seen at Links Hall, High Concept Laboratories, Experimental Sound Studio, Hume Gallery, Tritriangle, and No Nation in Chicago, as well as Movement Research, Galapagos Art Center, Williamsburg Arts Nexus, and Triskelion Arts in New York, New York. She also worked as the Lighting Designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for whom she designed Second Hand, Antic Meet, Nearly 90², and more than 30 unique event performances seen around the world. She continues to design for performance in Chicago with Every house has a door.

Sarah Skaggs is a performance producer, manager, and assistant director based in Chicago, Illinois. Skaggs has been producing art and cultural events, collaborating with artists, and engaging the structures of arts policy for nearly 20 years. She has worked for Every house has a door since 2015.

Development of Broken Aquarium was made possible by support from the MacArthur Funds for Art and Culture and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts FCA Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund, and the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Zajc Rijecka & Rijeka 2020 — European Capital of Culture.

Essi Kausalainen would like to thank the Kone Foundation, the City of Espoo, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Laura Paige Kyber: I love the name of this collective, “Every house has a door.” How did you choose this name? What does it mean to you?

Matthew Goulish: We wanted a name to reflect the concept of a company with an unfixed ensemble. The only permanent members would be Lin as director and myself as writer and dramaturg. Later, we were joined by Sarah Skaggs administrating and Christine Shallenberg designing lights and sound. We envisioned each new performance as defined by an invited team of intergenerational specialists, diverse in their backgrounds and practices. I found this passage by Jacques Derrida in his book Of hospitality, co-written with Anne Dufourmantelle:

In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world. There is no house or interior without a door or windows.¹

The extracted phrase, “Every house has a door,” seemed to capture the desired quality of circulation, the sense of being both closed and open, the way every interior by definition gives way to an exterior. I immediately began to get compliments on the name from bank tellers. When we were in the process of filing our not-for-profit paperwork, I needed to call the relevant government agency and the woman on the phone said, “I love the name!” Incidentally, Lin and I just gave a copy of that book, Of hospitality, to Chef Jason Hammel and the team at Cafe Lula in Logan Square to congratulate them on winning the James Beard Award for Hospitality. It’s a very competitive national category. We always have a dinner there at the end of each intensive rehearsal residency. They are very accommodating to Essi Kausalainen’s vegan diet. I have found so much inspiration regarding writing and performance in Jason’s cookbook that it seemed appropriate to give them the gift of a book of philosophy. We presented it at the start of the dinner shift. The whole team gathered around to look at it.

LPK: EHHAD has been around for decades in Chicago, and many young artists have worked with the group over the years. What I love most about your work is how you’re able to create moments on stage that are so richly layered with meaning, yet use minimal stage design. Are there any core principles for making performance that you either hold onto in your own work, or share with young artists?

MG: Thank you for that very generous assessment. I have always thought that Lin has the capability to see people for their most singular contributions. She has that clarity, not an aesthetic or philosophical or moral position as much as simply the ability to see what is in front of her. She will then remove any element that competes with that singular contribution. This can make a performer uneasy because it makes you feel as if you are performing yourself, or a more clarified version of yourself than you are in the habit of presenting to the world. It requires you to accept your strengths, even if they seem too easy, or if you wish they were different. She encourages everyone to work from these strengths and only these strengths. In that respect, your observation about minimal stage design is related to the influence of the work and the teaching. Remove all non-essential elements and trust that what you have will be enough. Do not crowd the work or overload it out of insecurity. I think our performance grows out of this, with a related aspect of pure pragmatism, of transparency—like a performer putting on a costume onstage to build the image in front of the audience. No technique or technology interferes with the image that the performance presents of itself. I think this simplicity, which might be characterized as a somewhat punk rock aesthetic, is very liberating for students in speeding the arrival of their own work. In a sense, there is no offstage. I think people watching the performance see the performers as people first, with whom they identify as people, rather than as studied performers. These concerns also bring everyone’s attention to the setting of the performance, whether a theater or a public place, to appreciate its singularity, blocking out the world and creating a sheltered virtual space to perform within. All these qualities come from Lin as a director, and I think I feel very close to them partly because, growing up with an engineer father who insisted that we build the house ourselves before living in it, I learned to appreciate construction and the beauty of a lack of mystery in physical reality. I am often inspired by how the idea of offstage can also be onstage through a different consideration of space and how performers engage it. Lin and I live near the Empty Bottle, and one time we went to have dinner at Bite (now Pizza Friendly Pizza). The Bottle had a line around the block. We discovered people were waiting to see a live performance by Tim and Eric of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! After dinner we were once again walking past the Bottle, around the side. It was now night and all the people were inside. Just as we walked past the back alley, the door flew open. We heard the sound of people laughing and cheering, and Tim and Eric came rushing out. The door closed behind them and all was quiet again. They stood for a moment in the dark alley, looking around disoriented. One of them looked up at the sky. A few stars had come out. He exclaimed, “we’re outside!” The back door opened again, and a stagehand stuck his head out. “Guys,” he said, “I forgot to tell you. There’s no backstage.”

LPK: You’re drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects in your work. When we met almost 10 years ago, you were working on a play using the little-known work of poet Jay Wright. For Broken Aquarium, you’re again taking a work from the past as your source material. This time, a very famous piece of music, Camille Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, which is more than 100 years old. How do you choose texts or subjects as inspiration? Why the Saint-Saëns piece this time?

MG: Cave Canem, the organization founded “to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape,” celebrated Jay Wright’s work with a major event in New York this spring, which featured Jay reading his poetry just before his 90th birthday. After our 2017 performance of his writing in The Three Matadores, we co-published a three-volume selection of his plays in collaboration with Kenning Editions. It has been a joyful experience to spend so much time with Jay’s work and to correspond with him and Lois Wright, his wife and literary manager, over the past 10 years.

Regarding The Carnival of the Animals, it is true that Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite for children is his most famous composition and a recognized classic. He premiered the work on a Shrove Tuesday, a true carnival event preceding Ash Wednesday. While it was immediately popular, he only allowed it to be published posthumously because he did not consider it as important as his other compositions. This is another case of an artist’s most playful and lighthearted work succeeding beyond his more labor-intensive and serious attempts.

In our series of performances, we treat Saint-Saëns’s composition as an armature and a poetic structure, adopting only his categories as he names them. His logic for dividing up the animal kingdom follows a performative logic of contrasts and peculiarity, I suppose to keep children interested. When we began to collaborate with Essi, she brought the skills for including children or young people performers of ages ranging from 6 to 16. The Carnival structure gave us the possibility of devising multiple performances over many years, making one for each category, with children in mind from the initial structure and intent of the series.

The introduction of neglected subjects, as our mission states, took the form of substituting endangered or extinct species for Saint-Saëns’s actual animals. Our performance Broken Aquarium, which the MCA will present, warps Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” movement by populating it with actual aquatic entities such as the Lesser Electric Ray, Eyelash Seaweed, and Polyps that build coral reefs. All these creatures are either endangered or extinct. This is also one of two Carnival categories, like “Aviary,” that describes an environment. The loss or degradation of habitat is often the reason for the endangerment of these creatures, who live only in extreme locations with very particular conditions. Thus, ours is an impossible aquarium, since they could not all share the same environment. In Saint-Saëns’s day, the aquarium appeared only as a rare public performance, sometimes featuring a large tank full of tropical fish rolled out on a stage in front of an audience. We treat it this way, as a public event, like sitting at the edge of a park or square watching all the various people absorbed in their activities or playing or passing through, only in this case the people are dressed in fantastic costumes and pretending to be sea creatures.

LPK: Tell me about your collaborators! This piece is co-presented with Essi Kausalainen, who is based in Finland. How did you meet and begin your work together?

Lin Hixson: Essi Kausalainen forms an adjacent core to Every house has a door. She has a deep understanding of the complex relations with other beings, situations, and environments and, as an artist, is devoted to life-giving.

We knew and were inspired by Essi’s work before we met her, particularly her interests in inter-species communication, human-plant and human-animal relations, and her 10-year collaboration with plants. She writes, “my ten-year artistic collaboration with plants has redefined my relationship with artistic ‘materials,’ my own body and those of others. I have learned to see myself as a community, an open process that is constantly taking place relative to another.” So, when we were in Helsinki in 2015, we arranged to meet her and asked her to collaborate with us.

Essi designed textiles for the performers to wear in Broken Aquarium. She constructed these textiles in response to each performer and the specific creature they played. Essi describes her textiles as a relation, a way of being with. In the case of Broken Aquarium, it was a being with fish and a being with performer. The costumes broke the idea of clothes and instead activated body-sites for the performers to wear. Blurring the lines between performer and creature, a tentative relationship emerged between the two. The textiles sculpted an event-fabric, a middle in mobility.

LPK: This work has been performed once already, amidst a rainstorm at the Humbolt Park Boathouse. It will be performed outdoors again, but now in a very different environment at the MCA. How do you anticipate adapting the work for the space? How do these conditions change the work?

LH: We will encounter certain undeniable differences, such as performing in a private space rather than a public space, performing on grass rather than concrete, and performing under the sky rather than within an enclosure.
When we perform any performance, we adapt the work to the site. Each site comes with a particular set of conditions. It is not an empty basin where we enter and perform. It is an unfixed force with its hours of the day, its seasons of the year, its particular temperature, and its particular wind. It is not reducible to the performers or the performance. We will need to co-compose with it and discover its wonder, to discover the ways in which the performance and the site become inseparable.

LPK: What do you want audiences to take away from experiencing this work?

MG: This question reminds me of one of my great teachers, the playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes. Lin and I met in a workshop on the West Coast, where Irene was one of the teachers. We learned so much from her approach to making theater. We met up with her some years later. She told us that one of her plays was being considered for production by a theater with a higher profile than she had previously known, and when they interviewed her about it, they asked this question: “What do you want audiences to take away from experiencing this work?” She confessed to us that she had found the question confusing. It seemed like a test, and if she gave the wrong answer, they would not produce her play. In the moment, exuding her usual confidence, she answered as if it were self-evident: “I want them to be so overjoyed by the experience that all they can think about is coming back the next night to see it again!”

I think there is so much truth in her answer, and it also escapes the constriction of the question, which seems to misunderstand the relations of the event, at least as I know them. So much of the value of the performance is pre-personal. It does not entirely concern what we who design the experience of the work want, and it does not offer something that we can instrumentalize as tangible to take away. It neglects how the presence of an audience completes the experience and becomes absorbed into it. At the same time, it is true that the experience of the performance might present something otherwise missing from our lives, a feeling of affirmation of our abilities, of everyone’s abilities, and a reminder that we are alive, and alive together. These affirmations might even remind us that life is worth living. The weight of concerns that we carried with us when we arrived at the start of the performance—I’m speaking as an audience member now—they seem lighter at the end. I leave the experience of the performance with a new perspective on them. This is entirely because the performance did not concern itself with who I am and what my concerns may be. It respected my privacy, and offered me the hospitality of an alternative. It made a space for me, offered me the comfort of a place to sit or stand. It made sure I could see and hear. It did not overstay its welcome. There is a common feeling that sometimes arises at the end, that I have felt and other people have told me they have felt. I will risk calling it happiness.

Footnotes:

1. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2000), 61.