Chicago Performs returns: We talk with the artists behind ‘Broken Aquarium’

Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary art has billed itself as a space where new ideas are shown and tested since its inception in 1967.

“What many people don't know is we also have a 300-seat theater in the basement of the museum,” said Laura Paige Kyber, the performance curator at the MCA.

The museum will put that theater to use this weekend with the return of its third annual “Chicago Performs.”

“Chicago Performs is a mini-festival,” Kyber said. “Each year, it just features a cross section of contemporary performance works being made in Chicago and hopefully to introduce them on a larger platform and into a more national spotlight, which the museum can provide.”

The four-day event features interactive and multimedia performances from a few Chicago-based artists and art collectives, including cat mahari, Lakshmi Ramgopal (who leads a project called Lykanthea), and Every house has a door, which is led by husband-and-wife duo Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson.

In this episode, Rundown podcast host Erin Allen talks with Goulish and Hixson about “Broken Aquarium,” a multimedia performance about a changing Earth, performed outdoors on Sept. 28 and 29. In it, they use textiles, poetry, dance and water to illustrate the intricacies of an “impossible ecosystem of endangered or extinct sea creatures.”