Emily Brady’s Radiant Flux

Coming from wildly different backgrounds and disciplines, eight women share the stage for one night to perform their original work. Folk songs and experimental music, poetry and monologues, performance art and story telling magnetize, revealing distinct voices, common threads and downright compelling art.

Tara Betts is a freelance writer and poet. She has published articles in Black Radio Exclusive, Hues, New City, and The Source. Tara teaches creative writing to elementary school students in Chicago public schools as part of the North Lawndale Learing Communities, NLC Art program. Tara also teaches adults at Cook County Jail and at the Writers Voice based at Duncan YMCA.

Emily Brady has been producing and performing shows in Chicago for the last four years. Credits include runs of The Vertigo Show, featuring women artists, at Lunar Cabaret, Caf‚ Voltair, Sheffield?s and Fitzgerald?s, and the Fox Force Five group show at Randolph Street Gallery. She was a featured artist in the Guild Complex? New Voices series and Insight Arts Women?s Performance Jam. Her shows and writing have received notices in The Chicago Tribune and Streetwise. She has performed live on WNUR and WGN radio.

Kris Delmhorst has spent most of her life with two separate passions: one fore music, and the other for words. After 23 years the musician and the writer learned to work together, and since the nKris has been casting spells in clubs and coffeehouses throughout the northeast and beyond, delivering energized performances of songs that are lyrically memorable and emotionally true. She has shared stages with such local midwestern artists as Peter Mulvey, Pamela Means, and Rose Polenzani.

Jennifer Dowlin-Kelly is a Master of Fine Arts student in the Performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA at Penn State, where she received the College of Arts and Architecture?s most distinguished Creatibe Achievement Award in 1995. Dowlin-Kelly participated as a Featured Artist in the 1998 Cleveland Performance Art Festival. She has performed at othe venues around Chicago, including Insight Arts, Gallery 2, Blue Rider Theater, and Egg Gallery.

Danielle Malkoff is a sound artist living in Chicago. Abandoning conventional training, she plays the accordion and other instruments with the intent to use all sounds produced, even those not expected to be heard. In her collaborations with Ribbon Effect (Jacob Ross and Bill Talsma) the group creates improvisationally, listening for intersections that elicit images and emotions. Building anticipation with patience, desire, and a frontier sensibility, they navigate sonic terrain betweeen American folk and blues, experimental tradition, and contemporary electronic music.

Mars, the founder of a street poetry group called Poetic Service Announcement, Mars collaborates with other poets to present urgent political messages. As a political activist, she has fought against nuclear weapons, apartheid, lockdowns in public housing, the Gulf War, rape police brutality, attacks on abortion, censorship, the KKK, the Promise Keepers, and the railroad of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Lara Oppenheimer?s work explores the body that records experiences, the uncontrollable ever-changing body, the body that loses and finds itself in relation to the world. Using movement, vocalization and costume, she tells stories of her body and her experiences. She graduated with a B.F.A. in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the last two years she has performed solo and collaborative work at numerous venues, including Fox Force Five, Tough Nights at Tough Gallery, Thax After Dark, The Mission, Charybdis Gallery, and HotHouse.

Jennifer Tucker enjoys being the center of attention. She writes monologues and poetry. This is her Chicago stage premiere.

An NEA Fellow, Martha Modena Vertreace is a Professor of English and poet-in-residence at Kennedy-King College, Chicago. Her books of poetry include Second House From the Corner, Under a Cat?s-Eye Moon, Oracle Bones, and others. Her books Light Caught Bending and Second Mourning were awarded Scottish Arts Council Literary Awards. Earning four Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, she was twice a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Writer?s Retreat in Scotland, and a Poetry Fellow at the Writers? Center, Dublin, Ireland.