The Metal Shop Mission

To create theatrical events that foster radical community-building and authentic exchange between artists and audiences.

A Performance Laboratory

In the short-term, The Metal Shop is committed to paying contracted artists $25/hr to experiment in their creative processes. The long-term vision for The Metal Shop is to have a resident workshop space in Chicago and to secure funding to employ staff members along with increasing the scale of the projects it can support.

What We Do

Founded in 2019, The Metal Shop supports artists experimenting with intersectional, feminist ideas and methods of theatrical process and performance. The Metal Shop seeks to use the tools of performance to ignite the potential of strangers to create community across divides of culture, language, generation, and lived experience. The Metal Shop values co-creative process, artist compensation, process over product, and performance as a continuation of process. In the co-creative process, writing, design, and rehearsal processes happen concurrently and in response to one another. The audience is a vital collaborator in Metal Shop projects, which invite community members to contribute to the ongoing life of the project through their presence and participation.

Why The Metal Shop?

In a metal shop, the addition of heat causes a chemical change to the materials, melting and forging them into new shapes and leaving them irrevocably transformed. At The Metal Shop, our intention is that art, artist, and audience are all altered by the encounter.

PROJECTS IN PROCESS

Soul.Net

A work-in-progress by performance maker Kost confronting the technological reckoning, artificial intelligence, and what makes us human. Read more about their work at www.jtkost.com.

The Vulnerable Year

Created by Grace Dolezal-Ng (Performer), Maria Simpkins (Writer), and Alex Mallory (Director). The Vulnerable Year was The Metal Shop's first experiment in the 40-hour workshop, in which the artists were paid for their time with no expectation of final product, and in co-creative process, in which the concept, text, and performance were developed concurrently and in response to one another. The resulting work-in-process presentation experimented with establishing consent for controlled and improvised audience interactions, exploring comfort zones for both audience and performer in search of mutuality.

A Wakening

A WAKENING is a call to break generational cycles of silence, shame, and trauma through personal connection. A WAKENING invites its audiences to encounter deconstructed scenes and characters from Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), in which the adolescent need to experience life for oneself and the parental desire to protect create a seemingly impenetrable divide. These pieces are layered with stories, encounters, and works of art inspired by these scenes and characters, linking people together through story and lived experience. A WAKENING is an installation: the space is filled with letters and notes, images, and audio-visual elements. Audience members are invited to interact with the space and to take or leave something of themselves in the space, by writing on a post-it or in a journal, drawing, or recording a voice or video memo, leaving an imprint of their experience behind.

Rehearsals for an earlier iteration of the project began in March 2020. Due to the disruption of COVID-19, the performers created their own video responses to the work through virtual meetings, elements of which will be incorporated into the installation project.

2020 A WAKENING Team:
Devisers: Anna Civik, Cayla Jones, Juliet Wolfe, Owen Boardman, Tulsi McDaniels;
Concept & Direction: Alex Mallory; Associate Director: Claire Bauman; Stage Manager: Audrey Ney; Design Consultant: Gabrielle Strong; Dramaturg: Rebekah Bryer.
Graphic design by Anna Cohen.

A Message About Community and Practicing Anti-Racism

The Metal Shop is committed to dismantling racist (and in particular anti-black), capitalist, and colonial power structures by putting the community at the center of our work and examining the ways these structures make their way insidiously into our work. We are committed to amplifying the voices of our BIMPOC artists and inviting global majority artists and community members to play key roles in the direction of our work. We believe in battling systemic racism by creating opportunities for our artists and community members to engage in self-awareness, critical reflection, and taking responsibility for their feelings and actions.

We invite you, as members of The Metal Shop's community, to hold us accountable to these commitments.

Interested? Want to get involved?

Email The Metal Shop founding director Alex Mallory at alex @themetalshop.org [remove space].
The Metal Shop is currently seeking collaborators, advocates, and financial supporters, as well as connections to like-minded artists and organizations.