The City as Text
Bloomingdale Trail architect's rendering
Reading Blair Kamin’s Monday post about the Bloomingdale Trail—in which he reflects on the city’s recent announcement about funding for the Trail—got me thinking about the many conversations I had about the Trail last year that culminated in Walter Hood’s amazing lecture “Industrial Past, Green Tomorrow” at last November’s Festival.
Meetings with the Friends of Bloomingdale Trail and the Trust for Public Land and everyone’s favorite...
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Posted Tuesday, March 13 by Julia Mayer
And the winners are . . .
We had a ball during the fall Festival with A Secret Poem. It was wonderful to see many of you seeking out clues and stickers at various Festival events. One of the many high points was hearing Charles Bernstein read “This Poem is in Finish,” the poem he wrote especially for this game, at his CHF program (at approx. minute 30).
While we saw many of you playing, only a handful of people submitted completed poems. Thanks to all that participated, at every level.
Winners...
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Posted Monday, December 12 by Julia Mayer
A Secret Poem Revealed!
Big thanks to everyone that played "A Secret Poem." It was wonderful to see so many of you with your game cards seeking out clues and sharing answers during the Festival.
Herewith the secret is revealed:
This Poem Is in Finishtoggle here for translationWhile I remain in English, either stranded orAs one drunken and wheeled to a paddyWagon. There was a time I drank blueberryWine but that was long ago and my powersOf recollection are still too strong to...
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Posted Tuesday, November 22 by Julia Mayer
Game Clues Revealed: It's Not Too Late to Play!!
We know a lot of you love to do crossword puzzles. And we know that many of you were aware that during the Festival there was a CHF game afoot. Well, that game, "A Secret Poem," is very much like a crossword puzzle. During the course of the Festival, there were a lot of clues to hunt down and from the feedback you've given us, we think we might have made it a little too hard to find them all. So, we want to help. It was never our intent to make the game too hard to play. (Next...
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Posted Tuesday, November 15 by Julia Mayer
Dancing with Science
When we were considering our options for including dance in this fall’s Festival, we didn’t set out to find collaborations between choreographers and scientists. But, with technology in mind, the projects we felt most drawn to were indeed such collaborations.
This weekend, we partner with the Museum of Contemporary Art to present the Dance Exchange performing Liz Lerman’s latest work The Matter of Origins. This is rich, fully-realized work that Lerman developed from a residency with the...
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Posted Tuesday, September 27 by Julia Mayer
CHF's Got Game
I’ve done a very unscientific poll and discovered that folks young and old do not generally associate the word “game” with the Chicago Humanities Festival. Dialogue. Philosophy. Lecture. Edification. These are some of the words that come to people’s minds when I ask them for one word they associate with CHF. “Game” is never mentioned.
Well, that’s about to change. And for any of you with an inclination toward crossword puzzles, word play, poetry, friendly competition, trafficking in...
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Posted Thursday, September 22 by Julia Mayer
The Quest to Learn How Kids Learn Best
Katie Salen on the first day of school at Quest to Learn in New York City.
Katie Salen is a game designer, executive director of the Institute of Play and recently appointed professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. Several years ago, while teaching at Parsons The New School for Design, Salen and her collaborators began more closely observing how kids learned and played videogames. Kids spent hours...
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Posted Tuesday, September 13 by Julia Mayer
Stages, Sights & Sounds Redux
44 programs in 13 days! It’s been a bit of a blur—and many of my colleagues stayed up much later and had more frontline responsibilities than I did. But we’re a small shop and everyone in our 16-person office pitched in. I’m exhausted and incredibly proud of the work CHF just brought to Chicago. Here are some of my personal highlights:
Week 1
—Monday, May 2: Hanging lights for Baobab from the catwalk above the stage at the Barber Theater. So great to get out from behind my...
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Posted Tuesday, May 17 by Julia Mayer
CHF Goes to Argonne National Laboratory
Once in a while there is an opportunity for my programming colleagues and me to do some collective research. One such opportunity was a fascinating field trip we took to Argonne National Laboratory in early February, where we toured several of Argonne’s research divisions. At the Transportation Center, we got a primer in how a lithium-ion battery works from Jeff Chamberlain, Argonne’s Head of Chemical Sciences and Engineering Electrochemical Energy Storage and learned about Argonne’s...
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Posted Monday, April 25 by Julia Mayer
Springing Forth with Stages, Sights & Sounds 2011
The melting snow has me thinking about spring. Freshness, green, innocence, nurturing our young; it’s an actual and metaphoric time of rebirth. It’s a good time for stories: creation stories; stories that explain and reveal the radical changes occurring in the natural world all around us. It’s also the perfect time for Stages, Sights & Sounds, CHF’s international performance festival. Stages is geared toward children and families but is ripe with wondrous imagery and storytelling that...
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Posted Monday, February 14 by
Taking on Technology
Human experience is inextricably linked to technology. At its root is the impulse to craft a better, easier, more informed life.
From the creation of the first stone tools to the development of the printing press, from the blast furnace to the assembly line to the microprocessor, technology is the expression of human ingenuity and the catalyst for the next big idea.
Today tech permeates everything: our professional lives, our personal relationships, our...
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Posted Tuesday, February 08 by Julia Mayer
Food News and Views
Last week the New York Times and other news outlets reported on a new voluntary food labeling system developed and soon-to-be implemented by many of the largest US food manufacturers.
While I’m sure this was news to many readers, for those of us who attended CHF’s “Reformulating Food” program last fall, it was not. On that November day, Danielle Greenberg, Director of Nutrition and Scientific Affairs at PepsiCo, shared details of this new initiative and audio from the...
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Posted Tuesday, February 01 by Julia Mayer
Hypochondria: What's going on in there?
Writing about anatomy last week got me thinking about the difference between actually looking inside the body and doing so imaginatively, which most folks are probably more comfortable doing than heading over to their nearest cadaver lab. And so I re-read Catherine Belling’s essay “Graphic Brain-Imagining” in Atrium, the quarterly journal of the Northwestern University Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. The first time I read it was during my “body” research last winter. Katie Watson, a...
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Posted Tuesday, September 07 by
Hayes's Anatomy
One of my strongest visual and olfactory memories of my graduate studies in dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the afternoon that my “anatomy & physiology of dance” class visited the UIUC College of Medicine’s cadaver lab.
Up until that day, we’d been studying anatomy in books and putting to test that book-knowledge in the dance studio. Probably more than many med students, we dancers were eager to palpate the origins and insertions of as many muscles as we...
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Posted Friday, August 20 by
More Dancing!
I have a bit of unfinished business from my last post. There are even more fabulous dance offerings this Fall: two more very exciting programs that are coming at dance from very different directions and moving it into some exciting new territory.
Ananya Chatterjea, who runs the Dance Program at the University of Minnesota and is a committed fighter for social justice, will consider the ways in which dance can be a creative bridge from ideas to action. Two members of her company, Ananya...
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Posted Wednesday, August 18 by Julia Mayer
Dancing Toward the Fall Festival
What a relief—to write a blog post and not worry if I’m going to spill the beans on a program we haven’t officially announced yet. While our printed program guides won’t be mailed until August and our website will switch to “Festival mode” at about the same time—the cat is out of the bag! We are still putting the finishing touches on a few programs, but nearly all of the 100 or so programs we’ll do this fall are confirmed.
I’m especially excited that our Body theme lends itself to more...
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Posted Friday, June 25 by Julia Mayer
CHF Spring Festival is not just for kids anymore!
CHF’s spring festival "Stages, Sights & Sounds" is in full swing! Last week, Vélo Théâtre (from Angers, France) presented There’s a Rabbit in the Moon, an utterly delightful tale of an eccentric, empathic magician named Thomas Snout who has the power to conjure soothing and surprising images to help nights pass more easily for restless young souls. This program is geared toward 4-8 year olds, but the morning I saw it, 50 or so 8th graders and their French teacher came through the door. There...
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Posted Tuesday, May 04 by Julia Mayer
Step By Step
A few days ago I spent the morning discussing the work of Bill Hayes with colleagues. (That’s writer Bill Hayes, not the actor from “Days of Our Lives,” though it was fun to poke around his website, too.) Writer Hayes’s recent books are Five Quarts: A Personal and natural History of Blood, and The Anatomist, an eminently readable history of the anatomists who wrote and drew the original Gray’s Anatomy (not Grey’s Anatomy. Oy, TV is everywhere.) Then I went searching for George Romero (aka Mr....
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Posted Friday, April 02 by Julia Mayer
Marching Forward
I thought I’d be back with another post about the bionics program right away, but that isn’t actually how things work around here. Sometimes ideas surface, get discussed, and then submerge again. Bionics will certainly re-emerge.
In the meantime, web research, conversations with colleagues and informal advisors, and unsolicited proposals have taken the foreground in the last few weeks. In our programming meetings, we’ve been culling through our lists and beginning to invite people and put...
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Posted Tuesday, March 16 by Julia Mayer
Bionics: Anatomy of a Program
Those of us in programming at CHF are frequently asked about our jobs, everything from “why does it take you a year to put together a two-week festival?” to “it must be so complicated, how do you pull it all together?”
We are in the early stages of planning for our Fall 2010 Festival on the Body and it seems a good time to start charting the development of a program--to give you all some insight into how, piece by piece, we put the Festival together.
Some programs come into being...
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Posted Tuesday, February 02 by Julia Mayer
