Pillsbury House Theatre’s award-winning Breaking Ice company takes on race, class, and economics in this entertaining and thought-provoking live performance.

• How are our neighborhoods responding to development and change?
• How do we respond to culture clash and conflict?
• How can neighborhoods evolve in economically stable and sustainable ways?

We invite you to join us for the show and participate in a short, facilitated discussion afterward as we confront these questions in an effort to strengthen the ties that bind neighbors together.

February 18, 25 & 26

7:30 pm at Pillsbury House + Theatre (Map & Directions »)

Tickets

Pay-What-You-Can. Pick your price for every performance. ($5 per ticket minimum to reserve in advance.)
Reservations: Call 612-825-0459 or reserve tickets online.

*Free Child Care is available for all three performances. Advanced reservations required: call 612-825-0459.

This production is one of the twenty art experiences in the Arts on Chicago initiative, an arts-based community development project led by Pillsbury House + Theatre, Upstream Arts, the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association, and MCAD Professor Natasha Pestich with support from the Ward 8 Council Office of Elizabeth Glidden.

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Two weeks ago, I was reading on my couch when I heard gunshots close to my house. Then there were police sirens, yelling and more shots, as it became apparent that the police and someone else were exchanging gunfire.  I moved to the middle of my house until the gunfire stopped and then looked out the window to see that a man was down in our alley and the whole block was being roped off as a crime scene.  The police were searching my neighbor’s back yard for a weapon and shells, and I realized how close the shots had come to my 4 year old son’s bedroom window.

When my husband, son and I moved to Powderhorn, near the intersection of 38^th and Chicago, we were aware that according to some people, the neighborhood had a bad reputation.  But when we walked the streets, talked with our neighbors, and stopped in corner stores, that narrative of an unsafe, blighted neighborhood did not ring true.  We felt drawn to the neighborhood. We felt at home.

But the shooting behind our house gave us pause.  I recently read an article about how scientists have discovered that the brain has a negativity bias .  It remembers, stores and reacts more strongly to negative experiences, while it more quickly forgets positive ones, even when the positive experiences far outweigh the negative. This one negative experience of a crime near to my house was threatening to override and obscure all the positive feelings I had about my neighborhood.  It was making me wonder if the old narrative of a violent, blighted neighborhood was actually true.

The Saturday after the shooting, Arts on Chicago had its launch party just across the street from where the shooting had occurred. Arts on Chicago is a collection of 20 different arts projects that will happen on and around Chicago Avenue over the next year and that will be carried out by artists that live and work in the neighborhood.  My husband and I had planned on going to the party, but our babysitter fell through and we were resigned to stay in for the evening.  But at around nine at night, after reflecting on the events of the week, we realized that we both needed to make peace with the neighborhood.  We called a neighbor and asked her to come over to babysit and at 9:15 were out the door and at the Arts on Chicago party.

At the event, we learned about all of the arts projects that were going to happen in our neighborhood in the coming year.  And crucially, the event gave us a space and time to connect with other people who live and work in this community.  I met Forrest, one of the artists involved, and realized that his daughter goes to preschool with my son down the street at Urban Arts Academy.  I met Jerry, someone I had seen around the neighborhood but never met. He had recently displayed his amazing sports memorabilia collection at Blue Ox Coffee shop, and we had a long talk with him about the heartbreak of being a Chicago Cubs fan.  I met Jenny, who lives around the corner from me and is involved in the Eye Site project; I agreed to have her and two other artists paint a glow in the dark mural on my garage.   And when Dylan, another artist, asked me to tell him a story about living in the neighborhood, I did not tell him the story of the shooting that should have been the most fresh in my mind. Instead I told him of how when we moved into our house, our neighbors– some of them who have lived on our block for over 30 years–stopped by to tell us stories about our house and the neighborhood.  They told us that 6 children had been raised in our small house, that once there was a neighborhood party in our backyard of over 100 people, and that there had been ups and downs in the neighborhood, but that they had never thought about leaving because this was their home.  The promise and potential of Arts on Chicago is not only that it will create new narratives about this neighborhood, but that it will bring to light the rich history of this neighborhood often obscured by negative stories.  An influx of artistic creativity will not solve all of the problems of this neighborhood, but it will bring us out of our houses on a Saturday night to talk to one another. And the next time we hear a story about another crime committed or about how unsafe the neighborhood is, the signs, murals, exhibitions and photos will remind us that no single story can capture or contain this place.

Bree Sieplinga, Associate Director Upstream Arts

Hi I am Noel Raymond Co-Artistic Director of Pillsbury House + Theatre. I have been working at PH+T since 1995 – I was hired originally on a grant to use theatre to help women (who were on what was at that time called ‘welfare’) move into the workforce, to help chronically truant teens succeed in school and to help adults with developmental disabilities build social skills – oh, and to make professional theatre that provokes, disturbs and motivates…

Fast forward 13 years and, in late 2008, I find myself, along with my co-director Faye Price in charge of not only the theatre related stuff but also all of the social service programs of Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center – a daycare center, homeless youth services, HIV education, tax preparation – and lots more. In my 17+ many years making theatre inside the neighborhood center, I had seen the arts make a difference in daily, incremental tiny ways as well as in life-altering, sea-changing profound ways over and over again…which is why Faye and I set out to integrate the arts and creative practice into everything that happens at PH+T – and it is why we believe so strongly in the ArtPlace goal of using the arts to build vibrant communities.

In our current work, we’re building on ideas from the ground-breaking research done by people like Susan Seifert and Mark Stern, and Minnesota’s own Ann Markusen – showing that lots of benefits accrue to communities that have high concentrations of artists and artistic activity – benefits that actually help ameliorate the negative impacts of persistent racism, crime and poverty – and we are trying to create the conditions that the research shows produce these benefits.

And the good news is – we don’t have too far to go – this neighborhood is full of artists, arts businesses and creative community building activity. Our role now is to knit together, highlight and support these creative assets while making sure that everyone has a way to get involved and lend their voice to the conversation. We’ve started by stitching together this Arts on Chicago partnership with Upstream Arts, Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association, artist Natasha Pestich and with the support of the Council Office of Elizabeth Glidden. Together, we have just finished selecting the second half of the twenty projects we will be implementing as part of our ArtPlace “Arts on Chicago” project. All of the projects will be done by people who live or work in this neighborhood. Two examples include – A photography project by Wing Young Huie who will be introducing neighbors to one another by photographing them together and then exhibiting 100 of these photos which will also include text in 10 businesses along the corridor with public openings for each. And Molly Van Avery’s Poetry Mobile project – Molly will be building a writing desk on wheels with the help of the homeless youth from Full Cycle Bike Shop. She will then travel the neighborhood writing 3000 poems with neighbors and mail them to all 3000 households in Powderhorn.

So, last week my son had to write a persuasive essay for his 10th grade English class – he chose to write about why arts should receive public funding (yay!) – he came and asked me for my opinion and I initially had lots of my usual responses about how the arts stimulate economic activity, build individual skills, bring people together, create a space for civic dialogue, bridge differences… – but his question inspired me to reflect on a really personal level about what it is during my 17 years of working at PHT and making theatre in this community that is so powerful and necessary and unique – and, for me, it is the act of imagining – being able to dream up – with other people – something that never existed before – really see it and then, together, make it come into being. There will be lots of opportunities through the Arts on Chicago project to do just this – from something as simple as the 5 bicycle racks that artist Kelly Brazil will make from repurposed materials to the handmade signs that Peter Haakon Thompson will make with neighbors to connect people and identify who lives here. We are actually standing in front of one of the AOC projects right now – And, so I’d like to introduce you to Heather Doyle the artist leading this project and the director of the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center.