The 2025 Pivot Arts Festival

PERFORMANCES JULY 12 – JULY 20
at The Wirtz Center Chicago

 

The Pivot Arts Festival is a vibrant celebration of adventurous performance, showcasing experimental work by artists of color exploring new creative territory. With a strong commitment to sustainability, the festival supports the development of bold, interdisciplinary projects that engage community, environment, and identity. Rooted in Chicago and focused on local artistry, Pivot Arts provides a platform for underrepresented voices to grow, connect, and be heard.

Friendship

Theater

July 12 – 13

In Friendship, playwright and director Katherine Dean Horton crafts a tender portrait of teenage friendship unfolding over one summer at a New England sleepaway camp. Through a tactile narrative that incorporates the act of making traditional friendship bracelets, the piece explores how relationships are formed, remembered, and left behind—with humor, heart, and emotional resonance for teens and adults alike.

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Paradise Aliens

Studio Art

July 12 – 27

Visual artist and immersive storyteller Alonso Galue transforms the Wirtz Center Chicago into a gallery site of myth and rupture in Paradise Aliens, a series of monumental murals confronting the trauma of displacement and the chaos of border politics. Drawing from Andean cosmology and folkloric symbolism, Galue renders exile as both psychic and spiritual terrain — inviting viewers into dreamlike landscapes inhabited by gas-masked figures, macaw-winged deities, and fractured monuments.   PARADISE ALIENS Saturday July 12 & Sunday July 27 [open exhibition during festival events] Wirtz Center Chicago 170 N Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60611

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Great Zodiac

Puppetry

July 19 – 20

The Great Zodiac Animal Race (Year of the Snake version), a solo puppetry performance that blends traditional shadow techniques with Japanese kuruma ningyō figure work. Originally commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago, the show retells the zodiac myth through Asian pictograms and Lee’s own childhood recollections of Lunar New Year celebrations in Hawai’i. A joyful work for all ages, it fuses ancestral storytelling with contemporary visual invention.

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Sunset 60 Minutes

A multidisciplinary performance influenced by the diaries of Jan Fabre and inspired by queer legacy and survival. This genre-defying piece blends choreography, voice, soundscape, and symbolic design to explore identity, inheritance, and the metamorphosis of artist into art. The sun and moon become a central presence in a world where gender, memory, and embodiment collapse into ritual transformation.

Theater

July 20

Sunset 60 Minutes is a multidisciplinary performance influenced by the diaries of Jan Fabre and inspired by queer legacy and survival. This genre-defying piece blends choreography, voice, soundscape, and symbolic design to explore identity, inheritance, and the metamorphosis of artist into art. The sun and moon become a central presence in a world where gender, memory, and embodiment collapse into ritual transformation.   SUNSET 60 MINUTES Sunday, July 20th  2:00 PM CST & 7:30 PM CST Wirtz Center Chicago 170 N Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, IL 60611 YOUR VISIT TO THE WIRTZ CENTER CHICAGO Parking will not be available for this performance. SP+ Parking is available at 474 East Huron Street in addition to paid street parking. Additional direction information is available at the Wirtz Center website: https://wirtz.northwestern.edu/chicago-directions/ Doors open thirty (30) minutes prior to start of program and the run time for this performance is estimated at ninety (90) minutes. Please email admin@pivotarts.org with any questions or concerns.

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