“We wanted to build a space for performance that wasn’t dangerous,” explains Sharon Evans, artistic director of the new Live Bait Theater, which opens its doors to Chicago audiences for the first time this weekend. “I once saw a woman and her chair fall off a riser in a gallery. Who wants to go through that to see a performance?”
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“If you’re just starting out,” Evans explains, “you perform at Randolph Street Gallery. Then you might move to N.A.M.E. gallery, and then to MoMing. After that, there’s no place to go. We hope to give artists that extra step.”
Evans, best known to Chicago audiences for her successful Portrait of a Shiksa at the Organic Lab Theater earlier this year, has been performing in Chicago for eight years. Her years of legwork made her see how badly a facility like Live Bait was needed, and the theater has been a cooperative–almost a family–endeavor: Evanss husband, John Ragir, is executive producer, and her sister, Catherine Evans, is comanaging director, along with Curt Columbus.
“We’re willing to accept certain kinds of technical limitations when we see work in a gallery, limitations that we would not allow in the theater,” he says. “We’re in a way more magnanimous to our colleagues, when the fact is that if the work is performed under the best of conditions, it might not hold up. We make excuses for technical limitations when the problem might be in the work itself.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/John Sundlof.
