Event

Corey Smith presents The New Prairie School at Colvin House

Equal parts architectural tour, immersive theater, and musical performance, The New Prairie School at the Colvin House invites audience members on a fantastical journey through an historic Sheridan Road Mansion. Guides sing, speak, gesticulate, and gyrate their way through the Colvin House. Along the way, their strange and beautiful performance becomes a reclaiming of Midwestern radicalism, a love song to the people and the buildings of Chicago.

Writer/Director/Choreographer/Composer:
Corey Smith with Ethan T. Parcell and Claire Saxe

Performers:
Ethan T. Parcell, Claire Saxe, Corey Smith

The New Prairie School was developed in Pivot Arts Incubator Program.

Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is classically trained, but is interested in art that obscures the boundaries between worlds: words that are sound, music that is image, body that is text. He works in a hybridized performance style a combination of original music, text, and choreography. Corey has been an artist-in-residence at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, and Grin City, and is a 2017 grantee of the City of Chicagos Individual Artist Program. Most recent collaborative credits include works performed at Defibrillator Gallery, Links Hall, Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the McCormick Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum. Corey studied music composition at the University of Michigan with Bright Sheng, Evan Chambers, and Erik Santos. He is a collaborator, a friend, a proud Mid-westerner.