In one episode of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar, then Proconsul of Rome, crossed the Rhine River to support allied Germanic tribes. His written narrative explains the necessity, but considers boats beneath his army’s dignity. He designed a temporary bridge, quickly assembled and removed. The descriptive Latin text has received speculative translation, including an “oblique” drawing from book 3 of Palladio’s four architecture books from Venice, 1570.

At the invitation of Chicago’s Julius Caesar Gallery Every house has a door will collaborate with sculptor Ilie Paun Capriel to create a platform/object installation. Scaled to the small size of Julius Caesar Gallery, this work will offer another generation of translation of Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine, and double as a stage for a context-specific 23-minute performance.

About Every house has a door:
Every house has a door was formed in 2008 by Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturge, to convene project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performances in which the subject remains largely absented from the finished work. The performances distil and separate presentational elements into distinct modes – recitation, installation, movement, music – to grant each its own space and time, and inviting the viewer to assemble the parts in duration, after the fact of the performance, to rediscover the missing subject. Works include Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. (2009) in response to the work of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, Testimonium (2013) a collaboration with the band Joan of Arc in response to Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony poems, and the on-going project 9 Beginnings based on local performance archives.

Matthew Goulish co-founded Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. His 39 Microlectures—in proximity of performance was published by Routledge in 2000, and Small Acts of Repair—Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, which he co-edited with Stephen Bottoms, in 2007. He was awarded a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency in 2004, and in 2007 he received an honorary Ph.D. from Dartington College of Arts, University of Plymouth. Goulish is Provocations editor for The Drama Review, and he teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs of the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lin Hixson co-founded Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. She is full Professor of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an honorary doctorate from Dartington College in 2007. She was awarded a Foundation for the Arts Award in 2014 and the United States Artists Ziporyn Fellowship in 2009 with Matthew Goulish, her collaborator and co-founder of Every house has a door. Goat Island created nine performance works and toured extensively in the US, England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, and Canada. Her writing on directing and performance has been published in the journals P-Form, TDR, Frakcija, Performance Research, Women and Performance, and Whitewalls; and included in the anthologies Small Acts of Repair—Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, Live Art and Performance, Theatre in Crisis?, and the textbook Place and Placelessness in Performance. Hixson has directed two films, Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka and It’s Aching Like Birds, in collaboration with the artist Lucy Cash and Goat Island.
www.everyhousehasadoor.org

About Ilie Paun Capriel:
Ilie Paun Capriel is a Romanian Belgian-born German national. He grew up in Los Angeles, where he studied economics and cinema studies, lived on a sailboat, and worked for the Hollywood studio system. He received his post-baccalaureate and MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He makes sculptures and installations. Formally minimalist cut with rococo, these spaces possess a collective psychological tenor that might be called Fate in a Pleasant Mood. His recent exhibitions include: If I had my life to live over, I’d live over a delicatessen at Johalla Projects, and The Four Horsemen @ St. Sylvester School Gymnasium. He lives and works in Chicago.

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Tags: Every house has a door, Garfield Park, Ilie Paun Capriel, Julius Cæsar, Lin Hixon, Matthew Goulish