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Last October, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) appointed multidisciplinary artist Ariella Granados as its first Central West Center artist in residence. Supported by the MOPD, the National Endowment for the Arts, and DCASE, the residency offers studio space and funding for Granados to develop her artistic practice, host open studios and meetups for artists with disabilities, and present a series of public programs between January and July. 

January programming launched with an open studio with Granados and a sound workshop by blind media artist Andy Slater. On January 27, Granados screens Experimental Graphic Score Performance, their first work completed during the residency, alongside an hour-long DJ set. Programs in upcoming months include a DJ workshop, an improv/comedy workshop with Jesse Swanson of iO, a set design workshop, and a makeup/character workshop—all designed to cultivate a community of artists with disabilities. 

“What I love most is . . . Ari’s playfulness in their work,” says Zhen Heinemann, DCASE director of visitor experience and public engagement, who has been working with MOPD on the residency. “The projects . . . seemed a fun entry point for folks . . . with wigs, makeup, set construction, improv. That kind of work supports a social environment to celebrate in community. Because Ari is a performance-based artist and a makeup artist, it’s a theatrical world. People who come from the performance world come from a place of collaboration and community. It’s a program that’s about opening arms and gathering people in, in a fun, playful, joyful way.”

Blending humor, drama, and improvisational play, Granados’s work spans creative direction, makeup, performance art, video, and music—frequently casting herself in alternate worlds and even altered bodies to experience, process, and reimagine personal history, family dynamics, and existence as a first-generation Mexican and Indian artist with a disability. In 2021, Granados created a series of videos using green screens to transport them to spaces such as the surface of a resident card (No Documents), a meat processing plant, a gas station convenience store, and the set of a telenovela (I Used To Have Cable Before He Left, parts 1-3), using makeup and costuming to transform themself into characters that inhabit these spaces, including imagined renditions of their parents. 

In 2022, during a residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Granados began to transform the background into the foreground by reinventing herself as a green character. “The color green is used to render things in postproduction, so I’m thinking of [the] color green and blue as ways of rendering my body,” says Granados. “I use the color green as a metaphor. When you’re standing in front of a green screen, you have to render the image you want into the green screen for you to be where you want to be. I started using green screen to put myself in different places, to recreate memories and imagine memories. [Now] I use the color green as a way of rendering my body.”

For more information about the programs and residency with Ariella Granados at Central West Center, and to register and request accessibility needs, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/public-programs-central-west-center-artist-in-residence-ariella-granados-tickets-477485651437

At the Central West Center, which houses the MOPD and the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services at 2102 West Ogden, Granados has been developing an album called /’pôlzē/. “It’sspelled the way it’s pronounced, palsy: to be paralyzed,” says Granados. “It’s me thinking about my experience being paralyzed and how I can convey that through sound, and thinking about experiences I’ve found paralyzing in my upbringing.” Coproduced with drummer Eddie Burns, the album also features musicians Josh Jessen (keys/synth), Alec Trickett (percussion), William Corduroy (bass/guitar), and Kenneth Leftridge Jr. (saxophone/flute)—a “community of people coming together,” says Granados. Three songs from the album will be presented on January 27, with videos created in collaboration with sound engineers at VSOP Studios, production assistant Erika Grey, and directors of photography Alex Halstead and Pouya Shahbazi.

“I grew up in the church and grew up singing,” says Granados, who was born in Texas and came to Chicago to study art at UIC. “When I left Christianity, I left singing. But when I built a friendship with Eddie and began to participate in the music community, it happened out of nowhere—going to the studio, making songs—before I knew it, I had eight or nine songs.” 

“This is what it feels like to be in my body, a paralyzing experience,” says Granados. “I have Erb’s palsy, paralysis on my right arm. It was medical mistreatment—the doctor’s fault when they were delivering me—then I was not properly treated. My mom had just immigrated to the U.S. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to navigate the medical system.”

“I didn’t really come into my disability identity until three years ago. I grew up hiding my arm—for 23 years. I was not in my body. I was very much just in survival mode,” says Granados. “Like many of us, I had a lot of time to sit with myself through the pandemic, and that was it for me. I was forced to come to terms with my feelings around my disability. I was tired of hiding. I think the moments that gave me confidence in coming into myself were through self-expression with my makeup and clothing. I was naturally drawn to bright colors and patterns as a way to distract myself from my disability.”

“Coming into my identity as a person living with a disability has helped me understand myself and step into my body. For so long I have been so deeply dissociated, living with chronic pain, what comes with having a disability. I’d premeditate how I would get up and move across the room and make sure I would do it in a way that people wouldn’t notice my arm.” Now performance has become “a way to reclaim my body,” says Granados.

Community has been key to Granados’s progress. “Finding the Chicago Artists with Disabilities Facebook page was life-changing to me. I had felt alone for so long. Being in a body is hard, especially with the upbringing I had. I grew up radically Christian, being at church conferences with 150 people praying for me, like God was going to heal my arm. It was because of those experiences that I hid. I broke with that when I moved to Chicago. I was 17. [I thought ] I shouldn’t be living with this much guilt and shame in my life for being myself, for wanting to express myself and be a human. Now I’ve been here for nine years. Community—that’s what’s kept me here, because the winters are brutal. There’s such a rich community here of artists and musicians. Now I’m slowly beginning to build a disability community. I’ve wanted this space for so long.”

The culminating project of Granados’s residency is designed to build and acknowledge this community of disabled artists—a video in which they intend to engage other artists with disabilities in visions of utopia: “What does utopia mean to you? What does it mean to be in your body? What makes you feel the most at home?”

For themselves, Granados says, “I don’t care for perfect. Utopia to me is an imagined place of rest and pleasure, where humans who look like me and different kinds of ways are celebrated and honored. Utopia is a place where I can exist freely and safely in my body. It’s a place that is digitally rendered, green, with an influx of images of big arms and hands. Utopia is a place that accommodates every body. It’s a place that prioritizes access and needs across the board.”

“I’m not a victim of pain; I am in relationship with pain and that complicates things because it’s one of the things you just have to come to terms with, and sometimes it’s really difficult to accept. I spend time in my room doing my affirmations—‘I am enough, yes’—but goddammit I’m also in a lot of pain. What do I do with that? Make art.”

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Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre—its “more popular younger sister,” in Sara Gmitter’s words—the 1853 novel takes the spotlight at Lookingglass Theatre next month in a world premiere adaptation written by Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh. 

Based on a period of bereavement, homesickness, and unrequited love in Brontë’s own life, Villette traces the journey of English protagonist Lucy Snowe to a fictional, French-speaking city where she builds a new life as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school. 

“It’s her last novel, and I think it’s her best one,” said Gmitter, an artistic associate at Lookingglass, in a joint interview with Walsh, one of the theater’s ensemble members. According to Gmitter, the bookis more psychologically complex and mature than Jane Eyre. “Villette is so much more realistic, and so much more grounded in real, lived human experiences that we can all relate to—that poignant feeling of unrequited love that Lucy feels and that sense of wanting to make a place for herself.”

Villette2/8-4/23: previews 2/8-2/17 Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; opens Sat 2/18 6:30 PM, then Tue-Wed 7 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; Sun 2/19 6:30 PM only; Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $50-$75

Walsh added that this novel is special because Lucy finds happiness, not through a “Hollywood-style” makeover, but rather through the personal connections she finds as she works to achieve a successful career and a home of her own. “She’s made a whole life for herself,” Walsh said. “It’s not a story where love saves her—where she suddenly has a physical transformation and becomes physically desirable to everybody.”

With most editions of the book clocking in at 500 pages or more, adapting it for the stage is an exercise in selectivity. Gmitter took Lucy’s first-person narration as a starting point for the play, which is also told from her perspective. 

“What would Lucy do if it’s a play? She’s only going to show us the characters that we absolutely need and the scenes that we absolutely need,” Gmitter said. “What does this audience, this night, need in order to go on the emotional journey that she wants them to have?”

One of Gmitter’s priorities for the adaptation was conveying Lucy’s sense of humor, which surprised her when she first read the novel. “Lucy is so funny sometimes—the observations that she makes, the way that she calls nonsense nonsense, and the way that she’s so honest but in this wry way that is also so clever.”

Her complex inner life was another key quality to get across in the play. “Just because Lucy doesn’t have all the experiences that a typical romantic heroine might have, she still has all these feelings, and she still has so many thoughts,” Gmitter noted. 

“The language that she has in the book is so beautiful,” she added. “We can’t have all of the beautiful words [in the play]. Fortunately, we have an amazing actor [Mi Kang] who can show us the beautiful words with her face and with the way that she holds herself.”

Kang leads a cast of six, most of whom are new to working with this playwright and director. “We had the best time assembling this cast,” said Walsh. “Sara and I agreed that we would know the people when we saw them because they would be the people who were these characters.”

“They’re an incredibly talented group, and they understand the play really well,” she continued. “You can tell when somebody gets the play, and this group of people just knocked it out of the park in their auditions.”

Gmitter added that it was important to find actors who could create a character that audiences would love to watch “even when they’re being awful.” She explained: “Some of them do some things that are not so kind, but you still love these characters because they’re so rich and they’re so deep.”

When it came to designing the production, Walsh and Gmitter were grateful to have plenty of time to meet with their designers—who are usually booked on multiple shows simultaneously—and work through the play together. 

“The design concept is that, rather than being a literal representation of a 19th-century world, it’s more of a psychological representation,” Walsh explained. “[It’s] warm, beautiful, compelling, psychological, and constantly transforming itself.”

Similarly, the costumes (designed by Mara Blumenfeld) are inspired by “a 19th-century silhouette,” but without the signature bell skirts of the era. One reason for this change is practical; there are four women characters in the play, and the space on stage is limited. “If everybody’s got the giant skirt on, there’s no way everybody’s going to fit,” Walsh said. 

“Because we made the decision to not make them specifically period-correct, we could play around with pulling in different kinds of looks, so the costumes look fantastic,” she added. “They look from another time, but they don’t look from any time in particular.”

In another departure from interpreting this period drama literally, Walsh and Gmitter decided the actors should speak in their own accents even though all the characters are British or from a fictionalized Belgium. The only exceptions are lines that the Francophone characters deliver in their native language; the actors have worked with a dialect coach on these. 

All the actors auditioned with and without foreign accents, and “everyone we saw was fantastic,” said Walsh. “But when we had them drop their accents and just be themselves, suddenly we were able to get this really honest window into who they were as actors. Then we just knew—this person is Monsieur Paul [Lucy’s love interest] or Madame Beck [headmistress of the school where Lucy works].”

“Unless the accent is necessary as part of the storytelling—especially since we’re telling a story that’s not set in the present day—it’s one more little excuse for the audience to think, ‘Oh, this is not now; this is not here. This is an adaptation of an old novel,’” added Gmitter. “If it’s [the actors’] own accents, it’s that much closer to what’s real and what’s present for the audience.”

Ultimately, Gmitter and Walsh want audience members to feel a personal connection with the resilient heroine of Villette and to be inspired by her remarkable story. “My hope, honestly, is that there are people who come out of the theater feeling the way I felt the very first time I read the book, when I was blown away by how much this, at the time, 150-year-old book was speaking so directly to me in a way that other books hadn’t,” Gmitter said. 

“For me, the message of resilience is so important,” added Walsh. “Lucy loses so many people; she struggles. She has to start her life over in a new place, with every obstacle in her way and nothing to help her.” 

“It’s such a great reminder that, at the end, she’s content,” Walsh concluded. “To take stock of what you have and to say, ‘This is a good life; it’s the life I have, and I’m going to find joy in it’—for me, that’s a really powerful message that Lucy shares, and I hope that resonates with the audience.”

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Mike Shaker’s sausages snap like firecrackers. His brisket melts away like smoked milk chocolate on your tongue. His mac and cheese is a warm, creamy security blanket in the cold, terrifying night.

Put them together on one plate and you’ve assembled the formidable, low and slow powers of Shaker Barbeque, headlining the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up—now at Ludlow Liquors in Avondale.

Shaker has decades of fine dining experience behind him (Nellcote, Nico Osteria, Cira). Back in the day, he headed up charcuterie production at the late, great Old Town Social. But when the pandemic struck, he left his post with the Boka Group and returned to the backyard passion he inherited from his late father.

Shaker Barbeque brisket

Armed with a pair of Weber bullet smokers and an infinite supply of post-oak, Shaker launched a guerilla catering and pop-up operation, pushing central-Texas-style barbecue on a greedy, salivating legion of chef pals. Today he has as much work as he can handle, emerging among the city’s tight-knit, collaborative renaissance of itinerant, new-school smokers. The sausages he stuffs with brisket trim and copious amounts of black pepper, achieving that startling snap with a five-hour, cold-hot smoke, interrupted by a skin-stretching ice water shock. I’ve been floored by those ethereal slabs of jiggly, smoked prime beef at previous Foodballs, when he’s jumped in to join the crew.

On January 30 he’s keeping it simple—filling walk-in orders for a single heaping plate of those magical meats, accented with his peppery sauce, plus mac and slaw on the side. Foodball OG Charles Wong of Umamicue is joining this crew, along with future Foodball OG Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ.

Look for a bacon fat-washed mezcal Old Fashioned from the gang behind the bar.

Just walk into Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California, starting at 5 PM, this Monday, January 30.

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