On Stage performance series 2025

Bold performances confront history during the return of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s On Stage performance series.

Since 2022, the On Stage series has focused on a curatorial theme that rotates annually. This year, On Stage takes Lineages as its guiding concept, featuring four works that explore notions of identity and shared history from outside and within the art world. Running from January to April 2025, Lineages moves to interrogate mainstream, Western ideas about what is considered “contemporary” in performance art, especially when non-Western art forms have historically been categorized as “traditional” or “cultural” despite developing synchronously and at times appropriated by Western artists as a foundation for the new. In doing so, Lineages examines the plurality and multiplicities of timelines and artistic developments, reshaping what we consider to be new.

Performances include Elisa Harkins’s Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ, a music and dance performance combining disco and Indigenous language; Anne Collod’s Moving alter-natives, a dance examining modern dance history through the lenses of gender, postcolonialism, and cultural appropriation; Miguel Gutierrez’s Super Nothing, a dance that works with his personal performance archive to examine how our past can provide a blueprint for honesty in the present; and Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, a theater-based performance that considers present-day remnants of colonialism through an avatar of King Leopold II’s ghost.

Lineages is organized by Laura Paige Kyber, Assistant Curator of Performance.

Save 20 percent when you purchase tickets to two or more On Stage performances.