nora paul

The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) returns to Chicago next weekend in its second consecutive year at the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC). The five-day festival features 20 films, ten short films, and a series of panels and speakers pulled from the worlds of architecture and design within Chicago and internationally. The festival runs in Chicago after visiting New York, Toronto, and Vancouver during the last three months.

During the second iteration of COMMON canvas, bodies circled around a center point: a pile of clothes in an upstage corner. For a moment, the pile of clothes moved, as if to take a breath, and the bodies around it held still. The performance, which Chicago dance artist and current Hubbard Street member Alysia L. Johnson created in collaboration with students of COMMON Conservatory, was built in a day.

Global displacement comes to the stage with Theatre Lumina’s Song of Home, one of many acts of the 2022 Physical Theater Festival Chicago that invites a shared humanity within the immediacy of live performance. Throughout the week, organizations will present a range of pieces including theater, music, juggling, clowning, and more. Marc Frost and Alice da Cunha, the festival’s cofounding couple, curate the participation of international physical theater organizations with such a spread in mind.