The Great Chicago Fire Festival

This article is part of a series of four articles on Creative Placemaking publishing in conjunction with the 2014 ArtPlace America Grantee Summit. The Summit will livestream Mon, March 3 to Wed, March 5 on HowlRound.TV. View the schedule and archive here. In Twitter, use #ArtPlace to participate in the conversation.

The Great Chicago Fire Festival is a new signature event for the City of Chicago. It is a citywide spectacle, co-produced by Redmoon Theater and the City of Chicago. It will be Mayor Emanuel’s first major cultural initiative and is wedded to his federally funded effort to convert the Chicago River into a hub of downtown recreation. Simultaneously it aligns with the City’s Cultural Plan in that it is a product of the city’s neighborhoods brought downtown for an explosive evening of spectacle.

What Mardi Gras is to New Orleans and the Running of the Bulls is to Pamplona, that’s what The Great Chicago Fire Festival will become to the Windy City.

The festival will activate fifteen Chicago neighborhoods through in-depth, site-specific arts programming leading up to the festival, called “Summer Celebrations.” These arts activities consist of a wide range of programming, including community barbeques, photography projects, sculptural builds, bake sales, and Redmoon’s transformative machinery.

Redmoon will work closely with community-based organizations, local artists, and community organizers in these neighborhoods to produce our Summer Celebrations. Redmoon is known for its collaborative process that brings together community leaders, diverse groups of participants, artists, and non-artist experts from a variety of disciplines in the creation of interactive, spontaneous, urban spectacle. Building on our core mission of shaping performances to public spaces and providing art to underserved areas, the Great Chicago Fire Festival will be a great chance for Redmoon to operate on the scale of the city.

Redmoon is dedicated to creating authentic collaboration with communities across Chicago that encourages people to see the space around them differently. In the past, we have brought out moving sets to public streets, mobile DJ carts to neighborhood blocks, and beautiful spectacle along the Chicago river to get people to stop and consider the space around them as sites to participate in art-making.

At the same time, Redmoon is known for its large scale spectacles which have activated some of Chicago’s great landmarks and stages. We opened Millennium Park and transformed the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art. We animated the lawn of the White House and created an annual event around Halloween that was a key ingredient in the revitalization of Logan Square in the 1990’s. 

The Great Chicago Fire Festival blends our neighborhood engagements with our large-scale spectacles by creating a massive fire spectacle on the Chicago River generated, in part, by long term engagements within Chicago’s neighborhoods.  We will work in tandem with community-based organizations from fifteen different underserved neighborhoods to create a festival that is truly representative of the diverse people of Chicago.

This is the biggest project that Redmoon has ever produced. The scale of the project comes with a host of exciting challenges. We are seeking to balance genuine engagement within local neighborhoods with non artists with the need for aesthetic integrity and grandeur of the final spectacle.  Inside the local communities we are moving within the immense complexities of the politics of race and gentrification and representation.  On the other end of the project, we are navigating the many layers of city governance. The site of the culminating spectacle is the main branch of the Chicago River, which, as a whole, reflects the governance of the United States Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, the City of Chicago’s departments of Transportation and Cultural Affairs, and is also overseen by the Chicago Police and Fire Departments.

What Mardi Gras is to New Orleans and the Running of the Bulls is to Pamplona, that’s what The Great Chicago Fire Festival will become to the Windy City.

I believe Peter Brook said that the goal of the first day of rehearsal was to get to the second day. We are applying the wisdom of this observation to the Great Chicago Fire Festival. Our goal is to get to the second year. This first incarnation is a proof of concept. The neighborhood engagements must be sincere enough to warrant a return invitation. The spectacle must be grand enough to demand a second look.