Nine New Fields: Notes on Goat Island and IN>TIME 2019

Mark Jeffery introduces the generative process behind the 2019 convening of in>time, an annual festival of Chicago’s tight-knit experimental performance scene. in>time closed the decade by celebrating the history of Goat Island, the ground-breaking company that itself formally disbanded ten years before. The 2019 festival continued as a retrospective exhibition, goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it, presented at the Chicago Cultural Center. Jeffery describes how the curatorial team paired nine artists/collectives with each of Goat Island’s past performances. Distributed across the city, all nine works arose in answer to one central question: “In endings, what is it to begin again?”