CURRENT BIOGRAPHY | Ashley Hollingshead and Corey Smith
SAT 25 JUNE & SUN 26 JUNE | 8PM
$10-15 SLIDING SCALE
GETTING TO KNOW YOU is a new devised theatre piece on the nature of friendship. A collage of ‘When Harry Met Sally’ quotes, queer politics, and stories of friendship gone right and wrong — GETTING TO KNOW YOU is an exploration into the lives of two recent Chicago transplants and new friends, Ashley Hollingshead and Corey Smith. In between dance breaks and secret handshakes, CURRENT BIOGRAPHY asks: How do you meet people and who do you let get close to you? What happens when a friendship explodes? Why does it get harder to make friends as you grow older you’d think that it would get easier with practice, right?
GETTING TO KNOW YOU is the first full length piece researched, created, and performed by CURRENT BIOGRAPHY.
Ashley Hollingshead is a theatre director, performer, and creator based in Chicago, IL. Her work mashesup popculture, personal stories, found text, movement, repurposed songs, and every day events into something that is simultaneously larger than life and close to home. She is most interested in making and creating theatre that explores what it means to be alive RIGHT NOW. ashley is intrigued by the tiny stories of the everyday, as well as the milestones that mark our lives. She uses theatre to find connection and to pull us away from our screens. ashley makes theatre to reminded one of what is good in the world and that there is still room for hope. And dancing. There’s always room for dancing.
Corey Smith is the other half of CURRENT BIOGRAPHY. We are creative equals in all aspects of this collaboration. Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer living and working in Chicago, Illinois. He is a classically trained composer, but is interested in an art that obscures the boundaries between worlds: words that are sound, music that is image, body that is text.. His creative work is eclectic and varied, but often begins with the bodies of the performers and stretches into ideas of identity—touching on autobiography and the personalaspolitical. He is in search of a personal and regional identity that contains contradictions, one that is queer, questioning, ephemeral. He is a collaborator, a friend, a proud midwesterner. Collaboration is an integral part of Corey’s artistic practice. He is a founding member of the Suburban Piano Quartet, an experimental chamber ensemble, and has collaboratively created numerous eveninglength performances with the group. Original collaborative credits also include Who is Luther Burbank?, a piece of dance theatre and EIGHT EASY STEPS TO BE LESS BLAND, a guerillastyle public lecture. His work is about capitalism and cornfields. Often there is wild, unabashed dancing.
CURRENT BIOGRAPHY is a Chicago queer performance collaborative helmed by Corey Smith x`and Ashley Hollingshead, dedicated to exploring new ways of creating performance. Drawing on their background as theatre makers and musicians, Corey and Ashley make work that is joyful and genre-defying. CURRENT BIOGRAPHY’s performances are vulnerable and real, with an eye toward accessibility. Through improvisation, found text, wild dancing, sharing personal stories, of play, they make a new kind of theatre that is non narrative, nonlinear, and all fun.
