The Metal Shop Mission
To create a locus of experimentation in intersectional, co-creative processes, and to build theatrical events that foster radical community-building and authentic exchange between artists and audiences.
What is The Metal Shop?
The Metal Shop is a space to experiment with intersectional, feminist ideas and methods of theatrical process and performance. In our increasingly disconnected world, The Metal Shop seeks to create authentic encounters between audience and artists through an experience of exchange and connection. Metal Shop projects seek to transform traditional methods of community-based practice in order to generate conversations and to forge new relationships with individual community members every night, inviting them to permanently alter the project through their presence and participation.
Why The Metal Shop?
In a metal shop, recycled materials and natural elements are melted, joined, and forged with fire into new life.
Core Values of The Metal Shop:
Co-Creative Process: all artists are part of crafting the vision for the project, and play specific roles in its execution. Co-creation is a non-hierarchical collaborative process that honors every artist and contribution in equal measure.
Process over Product: Artists are paid an hourly wage (currently $25/hr) to be in the creative process together. There is no expected outcome of the time spent in process, so artists are free to experiment. There are time limitations and public sharings of the work in process.
Performance as Process: Metal Shop performances are a continuation of the process, in which community members are invited to take part in shaping the piece through their presence and participation.
Accessibility: The Metal Shop currently plans to offer all programming for free or through suggestion donation in order to ensure accessibility for all community members. This is made possible with the support of individual donors, grants, and corporate matching.
Current Projects:
A Wakening
Deconstructed from Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, A Wakening centers the generational trauma between mothers and daughters, inviting community members to break the generational silence and shame around the sexuality of young women through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous exchange between artists and community.
The Vulnerable Year
The Vulnerable Year is a virtual interactive performance for one performer and community participants, inviting the participants to consider the role vulnerability plays in self-knowledge and self-love. Co-created by Grace Dolezal-Ng (performer), Maria Simpkins (writer) and Alex Mallory (director), The Vulnerable Year is The Metal Shop’s first experiment in co-creative process.
Cry Fie Upon My Grave
Cry Fie Upon My Grave is a performance created with three Latina and Black women military veterans to share the healing power of theater with their communities. The piece combines Shakespeare and personal narrative to share the journey of these women to building community and self-compassion. It is built from work with the DE-CRUIT program, which helps veterans to heal using Shakespeare and classical through communalization of trauma. The development of this piece was supported through an Individual Artist Program grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
Future Collaborations:
Artists currently involved in conversations for future collaborations include Native poet and musician Tanaya Winder (Southern Ute/Duckwater Shoshone), intimacy coordinator and stunt performer Teniece Divya Johnson, performance artist Joanna Lugo, and playwright Tatiana Gil. All Metal Shop collaborators are invited to imagine what process experiments they are interested in crafting and The Metal Shop will support the artist through their project with financial and physical resources.
