Kate Zambreno

Beautiful people crowd into a three-story-high 6,000-square-foot loft in the industrial West Loop, checking out the latest wall candy, cocktail conversation hardly audible amidst the DJs spinning. Every so often a gasp of a play or bark of a performance piece begins somewhere in the room, from puzzling sketches to poignant minutes-long pauses, with the hybrid of artists and art yuppies and yuppie-yuppies that comprise the partygoers choosing to strain their necks. Or not.

The location is Ourhaus, Collaboraction theater company's "artistic cathedral" that doubles as veteran painter Wesley Kimler's studio, during a very adult party entitled Fable. It's all part of last year's two-month-long Manifesto, that included weekly multimedia happenings with mythical-sounding names, like the fashion show Cry of the Peacocks or the fundraising feast Beggar's Banquet. Anyone who has ever attended Collaboraction's one-act Sketchbook festival, approaching its fourth season this fall, knows that the company has a firm command of spectacle and a flair for morphing the Chopin Theater into a rave-like atmosphere. But the Ourhaus events (both an invitation to community and a nod to the German artist collective, Bauhaus) takes that vision one step further to the quixotic yet gutsy heights of launching a social movement.

"I'm just waiting for them to start putting silver foil everywhere," jokes one member of the community of Collaboraction's aspirations, referring to Andy Warhol's famous Factory. "The great nightclubs were theaters. We're trying to pull that into theater and vice versa," says artistic director Anthony Moseley, who worked in nightclub promotion to forge those connections for Collaboraction. What this theatrical impresario has a knack for is opening the doors to all sorts of partnerships, from an ongoing alliance with Pops for Champagne to co-producing the Fast Forward Film Festival to hosting last New Year's Eve with promotions crew 3 Degrees to Moseley planning to direct a music video for the rock band Giant Step. Moseley flips through a scrapbook of the many Ourhaus events, fantasy concoctions full of breakdancers, burnt pinatas, fashion shows, circus troupes, fire-eaters, and his personal fantasy, mermaids. The party Pool in August featured a ritual dance with mermaids swimming in four 800-gallon pools, fire dancers, and a theremin player.

Perhaps the most established party of all is Sketchbook. The festival of ADD-friendly plays has lured some heavy-hitter directors and playwrights, from David Mamet to Eric Bogosian to Wendy McLeod, but the biggest attraction to this week-long event that draws in thousands is the nightclub atmosphere. You can drink, mingle, dance, and not have to sit still against the polite seat of a chair or talk in hushed murmurs until intermission during this adult playground. The media has scratched its head over how Sketchbook attracts the young hipsters who typically wouldn't sit still for even a twenty-two minute rendition of "Macbeth." "The theater people are freaked out by it," boasts Moseley. "They don't know how we're doing it. And the thing is, it's not even totally really true. We find our ideal crowd to be a really funky family reunion."

Moseley the exuberant showman thinks big and makes grand gestures, pushing and pulling and stretching his palms to make his point. "This video here is about the evolution of what Sketchbook can become. Sketchbook seems to be the thing, where we've poked into the membrane, where we've been like, oh, we've found the soft spot. Let's get the army, and this is where we're going to charge. Because it feels like, ooh, there's something really there that we can break through." Moseley shows the fast-paced promotional video used to pitch the Collaboraction experience to interested investors through the screen of his digital camera. The former Notre Dame finance major speaks in terms of "attacking," and "cross-pollination," how the goal of Collaboraction is to "evolve into a nonprofit mother ship" on a national scale, providing "the most edible theatrical product in the market for the widest base of consumers.

"In a way, I feel Collaboraction's at its best when it serves as kind of an all-star team of like-minded individuals," says Moseley. The company is currently composed of eleven members and countless associates, drawn from varying disciplines like lighting design, digital video, music, acting and graphics design. "There's that really inclusive nature. We're all about breaking down barriers between other theater companies, other artists, other mediums," says Moseley. Some of the actors had never been on stage before they came into contact with the company.

On the coldest day in February, the brave venture to a party at Ourhaus, the pre-party to the lineup of cast parties during the run of their new play with the tongue-twisting title, "The cosmonaut's last message to the woman he once loved in the Soviet Union," to be directed by Moseley. Although not the customary raucous turnout, there's still spectacle: a giant video-projection wall with a view from space, shifting to DJ Steve Walker's 1960s sugar-pop cosmos, Moseley and company founder Kimberly Senior bantering around, selling fundraising tickets for a lottery, and a midnight performance piece that's a perverse re-dreaming of Disney's "Lady and the Tramp." The Collaboraction community is out in force, manning the door, bartending, helping out.

This salon mentality and focus on community was there in the nascent stages of Collaboraction, when Senior launched the one-act festival, No MSG, in 1998 in the basement of Café Voltaire. Senior, who now serves as Director of New Plays and also works with Steppenwolf, Roadworks and Northlight, sees the Collaboraction aesthetic as "trying to guess what our audience is interested in." Moseley first joined Collaboraction as an actor in 1997, and took the reins as artistic director two years later. "I just knew Anthony could take it to the next level," says Senior. Moseley hooked up with Kimler that same year. The visual artist was a regular at the Wicker Park restaurant Soul Kitchen, where Moseley waited tables. "He knew we were doing Sketchbook, I knew he had these amazing black-and-white drawings, so we just started a dialogue about that," says Moseley. "And he said, 'Why don't I make drawings for Sketchbook that serve as the abstract world for these things to take place in?'"

Pretty soon Kimler became art director, sculpting the group's aesthetic, from its print materials to set design, and the company moved into the space. "At the core of the company, there's a theater company and a bad-ass painter," Moseley says. "Two classic art forms that have to evolve to succeed. Collaboraction and Wesley Kimler sharing that roof down there, being super ambitious. Wesley and I as kind of partners as well--we have to succeed. We don't have an option. We want to struggle brilliantly, you know."

"Anthony really has a shotgun vision," says Rick Foley, president of the board who had previously directed "Community of Characters," a fifty-minute documentary that chronicles the company's struggle to pull off their high-profile production of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Adding to the creative chaos, the production unfolded while being forced out of Kimler's prior loft and having $200 in the bank. The documentary premiered at another fete held at the Gold Coast nightclub Le Passage and is currently being shopped to local media outlets. "Right, we can do it all. And that's great. But when you talk about collaboration with artists, there's not really historically a lot of successful examples." The five-person board was brought in to manage and control the space, as well as tether the mythic aspirations of what Foley terms an "eclectic, kind of anarchical society." "The goal is to build a living, breathing condition that allows a community to thrive," he says. "But not have the business part thrust itself constantly onto the artist's experience."

If Moseley is the André Breton of Collaboraction, the Surrealist spokesperson who scrawled pointedly poetic manifestos, then Kimler is maybe its Salvador Dali , the artistic mentor with what can be gently termed a strong personality who pushes the company to think on the grandest and most cosmopolitan of scales. Remember the series of fluorescent orange billboards with the childlike black blobs on the corner of Ashland and Division near the Chopin Theater? A big scene in "Community of Characters" features Kimler going to battle for as little text as possible on the billboard--if any. "That was me fighting to make sure the things we do are interesting on a number of levels," he says later. "I wanted to put a big painting up there, with the name of the company and the name of the theater and let others figure it out." Much of the documentary portrays Kimler as a sort of Boo Radley figure, creating chaos in the company. "The thing about Wesley, I think, he's the pebble under the saddle that irritates the horse," says Foley. "It's good. He's made them think like that and go big." The documentary also pits Kimler and Moseley as two dynamic forces in an odd symbiosis. "I tried to show that they feed off each other, and they need each other almost like a drug. Wesley needs conflict resolution, and Anthony needs to resolve conflict."

"At the end of the day we're both these generous, loving, sweet guys who have these huge egos and personalities," says Moseley of the sibling relationship in his admitted "dysfunctional family." "He's much more confrontational, I'm much more liquid, you know? We light a fire underneath each other. When we asked him to join the company, he immediately raised his glass and said, 'Here's to walking with the myths.' He thinks on the grandest of scales. He thinks as a modern-day Napoleon. The world is an apple, you know, and he's about taking a huge vicious bite."

At the cave-like Ourhaus during the day, clucks of birds sound like catcalls. Kimler whistles at his family of red-and-maroon tufted African gray parrots and lets them out of their paint-splattered cages, explaining their names, like Madam Lou, christened for an ex-ballerina from Hungary. The birds know better than to play on the huge table bombarded with a volcano of oil paints. Moseley works in the office with managing director Scott Melanson, both full-time employees. The company has just finished casting for "Cosmonauts," a post-Cold War piece that follows two cosmonauts circling the earth watching quiet human tragedies underneath. "We feel like we're becoming characters in our own play," cries Moseley. The upcoming play tackles the theme of the alienation of technology, and Collaboraction has already received a hundred Internet submissions from playwrights and directors from Sketchbook, half of them international.

There are historical precedents for this attempt at an artist's collective--the Bauhaus, the Futurists, Ant Farm, Project Artaud in San Francisco, the Factory, and the 49-year-old Kimler sees himself as taking on the role of artistic mentor, sculpting the company's ambitions to be bigger, odder, even more fucked-up. "I don't have time to grow and develop," he says of the pubescent company. "I want things to be there now. I help the company be at a level that's exotic and interesting and on an international level." Take the forty live birds on stage during "To Kill a Mockingbird," or the billboards. "If we had done those billboards in New York, it would have been in magazines all over the world," he imagines.

Kimler's giving a tour of the studio, showing his new series of paintings, brilliantly colored works with surreal Napoleonic figures on tops of the blobs. "They're big, ambitious, romantic, serious, serious paintings," with a wide, dramatic gesture, revealing a fist studded with heavy silver rings. "I have a reputation for being a dark, critical entity here, a bête noire of Chicago," he slyly boasts, as he complains about the mediocrity of the Chicago art scene. "You go to an art gallery looking at someone's work, it's like going to a funeral," he says. "And the level of art you see if you walk into the lobby at Steppenwolf? Pretty much a bunch of junk. You ask yourself, this is a great company, why don't they have great art on the walls?" Kimler oversees Ourhaus as an alternative exhibition arena, which has featured the likes of Duncan Anderson, Saverio Truglia, Gary Justis, Tony Fitzpatrick, and Cat Chow.

Kimler admits he's not used to playing well with others, and when he chose to rent out the office to Collaboraction, and they moved into his world, growing pains occurred. "I couldn't do it without Anthony babysitting," he says. "I'm not the easiest person. I've worked alone for a long time, so I'm used to getting my own way." Right now he's focused on crafting the space capsule for the upcoming show. "The satellite we build has to have a physical presence. It has to be a sculpture, and a good piece of sculpture." After storming out during a fight over the aesthetics of the satellite, and its insulation, Kimler will take a sabbatical from the company after the show's close.

"At the end of the day, we're still a bunch of people sitting around in a circle, trying to figure things out," says Moseley, showing a photograph shot from above of the production staff in a meeting for last summer's Sketchbook, surrounded by Kimler's paper inkblots. "There's spirit here in our artistic cathedral," Kimler grins. "We don't want to live life in a complacent way."

(2003-03-12)

Also by Kate Zambreno

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Red Hot
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The War on Nightlife
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