Here is a collection of image and video documentation of current and past projects. Most of these projects were not made as images but were live experiences delivered with live audiences including all of the attendant difficulties and refusals to being held onto or frozen into two dimensions. Nevertheless we use them here to facilitate a memory or to help you imagine inviting us to bring some of these to you live at some point in the future or to contribute to the performance space now inside your head.
Image credit goes here: 359 attempts at levitation

Videos

Miles and Miles Taster

Miles and Miles Taster

Miles and Miles Taster

Goat Island

Goat Island was a Chicago-based collaborative performance group (1987–2009).

Members contributed to the conception, research, writing, choreography, documentation and educational demands of the work. Characteristically, rather than the usual proscenium theater situation, we attempted to establish a spatial relationship with audiences suggesting a concept, such as sporting arena or parade ground, or creating a setting for which there is no everyday comparison. We performed a personal vocabulary of movement, both dance-like and pedestrian, that often made extreme physical demands on the performers, and attention demands on the audience. We incorporated historical and contemporary issues through text and movement. We created visual/spatial images to encapsulate thematic concerns. We placed our performances in non-theatrical sites when possible. We researched and wrote collaborative lectures for public events, and often subsequently published these, either in our own artists’ books or in professional journals.

Goat Island was founded in 1987 to produce collaborative performance works developed by its members for local, national, and international audiences. Goat Island completed nine works: Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987); We Got A Date (1989); Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral (1991); It’s Shifting, Hank (1993); How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies (1996); The Sea & Poison (1998); It’s an Earthquake in My Heart (2001); When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy (2004); and The Lastmaker (2007). The company toured the US and England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, and Canada.

Core members were Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, and Litó Walkey. Associate members were Cynthia Ashby, Lucy Cash, CJ Mitchell, Judd Morrissey, Margaret Nelson, John Rich, Charissa Tolentino and Chantal Zakari.

Karen Christopher was a core member of Goat Island from 1990 to 2009. More information about Goat Island’s performances, films, teaching, writing and publications can be found at here

Goat Island Videos

Goat Island Makes Earthquake, video diary by Karen Christopher

Cake dance from It’s an Earthquake in my Heart, Goat Island, 2001, Arnolfini, Bristol

Excerpt from It’s Aching like Birds, film by Lucy Cash & Goat Island

Outside Projects 1974 – 2015

outside projects from 1974–2015

Other groups I’ve been part of include The Neo-Futurists, Lucky Pierre, and Chicago Actors Ensemble. In addition there have been some one-off projects which include Solid Decent Happy with David Kodeski and Michael Thomas (2003), Distance = a camel caravan on a grain of rice with Mark Jeffery (2007), and Quiet (a disruptive fog (or a hogshead full of vapor called memory)) (2010). I also worked on Glorious with Rajni Shah Projects in 2011 and Weaklings with Chris Goode & Co. in 2015.a

In the 1980s I worked with Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival in Los Angeles, and ages ago I was a member of Maui Youth Theater and the Vagabond Players.