Interdisciplinary is the most devalued word in arts funding, because it usually describes a painter who has commissioned a soundtrack. Elastic Arts, in Avondale, programmed the uncommon version through 2026: performances in which a dancer and a musician meet in a room with no score, no rehearsal and an audience already seated.

The series is Freedom From and Freedom To, curated by Cristal Sabbagh, and its sixth set ran on August 22nd. It paired the dancers Irene Chiao and the Haas Body Practices Anger Project with live musicians, and the pairing was not announced to the performers far in advance, which is the condition the series exists to create.

What Is In The Room

A floor. Amplification. Woodwind. Percussion that is not a kit. Bodies at a distance of four feet from the front row.

Improvised dance with improvised accompaniment fails more often than it succeeds and the failures are instructive in a way that a failed exhibition is not — the room watches two people decline to find each other for ten minutes, and the discomfort is the material. Sabbagh's curatorial decision is to programme the risk rather than the reconciliation, which is why the series has lasted.

Elsewhere in the calendar the space ran Night School, an audio-visual series, on July 22nd at eight, advertised with a minimalist line drawing of two baseball players mid-swing with their bats intersecting. The flyer is better than most of the art in the West Loop and cost nothing.

The Scene Nobody Covers

Chicago's experimental music infrastructure — this room, Constellation, Hungry Brain, the Experimental Sound Studio — descends in a reasonably direct line from the AACM, and it is the most internationally significant thing the city's art scene currently does. It receives a fraction of the coverage given to a gallery opening in Fulton Market. One cannot write about Chicago art without noticing that the institutions with the least money are producing the work with the most consequence.

How An Audience Behaves With No Score

They sit very still, and they do not clap between sections because nobody can tell where a section ends. The phones stay down, which is the only room in this entire package where that was true, and it is not politeness — it is that there is no image to take. Perhaps a fifth of the audience had instruments with them. Two people left during a long silence and the silence absorbed it.

This is not a small venue with an experimental programme. It is the research department, and the museums are downstream of it.

Cover image: St. Hyacinth Basilica rectory, Avondale / Wikimedia Commons