Masks & Myths: Devils & Dancers

I’m a long-standing Chicago artist with a background in classical Indian dance forms, music, poetry, and their ethnographies. My career has been a thrilling mix of choreography, production, and curation. With this project I’m expanding my toolbox to create a quintessential Chicago moment that I hope will awaken and rewrite history.

To many, the Midway Plaisance has been a haunting memorial of Chicago’s past. While the World’s Fair was a pivotal moment in American history, catalyzing our thirst for globalization, it was also a dark moment for many colonized communities. I saw the impact of this firsthand when my company Mandala Arts brought Sri Lankan artist and scholar Sudesh Mantillake to the University of Chicago for a presentation in 2017. When Sudesh approached the Midway Plaisance, where his ancestral artists were once “displayed,” tears came to his eyes. In that moment, I knew we had to create something new from these broken feelings. We needed to liberate artists, both those who came before us and those in the generations to come. Here was a chance to bring together Chicago’s diasporic and post-colonial communities!

To present Masks & Myths, we are going back to where the World’s Fair took place 125 years ago: in Jackson Park, Washington Park, and the Midway Plaisance. We want to start a dialogue, but we also want to share the beauty of these art forms that are rarely seen. We have chosen venues and communities within this area, including the Logan Center for the Arts and Englewood Montessori School to serve as partners. As we approach our final presentation in October, we hope to generate a conversation about our shared history through community performances and workshops.

My goal is to transport back through time—through ancient art forms, 3D historical set pieces, actual narratives—and then build forward to how these forms speak today. Every art form changes and flows over the course of time, and they change due to certain events. How did the World’s Fair, colonization, globalization, and liberation change these forms? I’m creating the space for these questions to be asked and delivered.

Your donations will help us create the landscape for our journey back in time, including set pieces and artists. Your donations will help us reach out to Chicago’s communities and to make this a uniquely Chicago experience, all the while giving our global and diasporic communities a platform to create, learn, and understand. Help us make this the significant project that we believe and know it is. We want our audiences and artists to find peace and community through this process. Thank you!