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Production Values
Bridget Kies ’02 launches a Chicago arts organization that brings a variety of performers and artists together.

By Cara Jepsen ’86

Bridget Kies '02 (pictured center with Elizabeth Czekner, left, and Liz Wuerffel, right) appears in Chance of Showers, a satirical performance collective that examines women's roles in the workplace. Kies performed at the College's Academic Festival on October 5. (Photo by Jeannine Mellinger)

Bridget Kies ’02 had no interest in theater until her senior year of high school. "Someone came to career day who was on the production side of a local theater," explains the Kansas City native. "I had no idea that you could do things in theater other than act.  It had never occurred to me."
 
Her interest piqued, she signed up for the College's First-Year Studies class Theater in Chicago. Taught by Dennis Mae, designer and technical director and lecturer in theater, the class requires students to see a play every week by Chicago companies ranging from the famous downtown institutions to fledgling off-loop groups.
 
Kies was hooked. That fall she wrote a short play that was accepted for Playwrights in Progress (a program that pairs theater mentors with student playwrights), joined the Garrick Players, and set out to learn everything she could about theater.
 
She's still hooked but on more than just theater. Last year she and Catherine Hermes '02 co-founded the Chicago-based interdisciplinary arts organization pretty blue sky, which brings together the work of various performers and artists. In addition to performances, pretty blue sky has an online journal and a digital gallery that Kies hopes to turn bricks-and-mortar once the group finds a permanent home. "People want to work together but don't necessarily have a way in with other groups, so they stick to the people they know," she explains. ìI think it's exciting to bring in different artists and ideas all the time."
     
Their most recent endeavor was a theater production of the Noel Coward play Private Lives, performed at the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago. "We figured the best way to do it was on our own," says Kies, who teaches an interdisciplinary humanities class at Valparaiso University. "But I wanted to do something different — to make it a place where we could explore different kinds of arts and acknowledge that there isnít just one stamp to put on who we are and what we do." 
     
Their show featured a minimalist set in contrast to lavish ones usually seen in productions of this play, which explores themes of love and marriage. Kies, who co-directed with Brian DesGranges '03, wanted the audience and actors to focus on Coward's language rather than props and costumes.
     
Kies, who worked for three years as Mae's administrative assistant while enrolled at the College, credits her time there cementing her interest in everything theatrical. "I think if I had gone to a large university with a major theater school, I may not have felt like I belonged," she says. "Dennis was great at helping us when we were freshmen and fostering our talent and letting us grow even if we didn't have experience."
 
She went on to hold just about every off-stage job on Garrick productions and chaired the group her senior year. The College did not yet offer a theater major, so Kies became an independent scholar and double majored in French and contemporary performance Practice.
 
Mae had begun hiring adjunct theater faculty who worked in the business, and Kies found paying work at Waukegan's Bowen Park Theatre through lecturer Maggie Speer. There, she stage-managed Noel Cowardís Blithe Spirit, directed some one-act plays, and assistant directed another play. She also completed an internship in Paris at the venerable Thèatre des Champs-Elysèes.
      
After graduating and completing an internship at the Goodman Theatre, she returned to Paris to teach English. "I realized after a year that I needed to be doing something with performance and theater," she says. "But I didn't just want to do that. I also wanted to do something where I also got to write or think about sound or do an installation or work in a more visual medium."
      
In 2006, she earned an MFA in interdisciplinary arts and media from Columbia College Chicago, where her fellow students urged her to get onstage. "Because I came from a theater background, they assumed I was a performer," she says. "I got thrown into it."
 
Now, she is one-third of Chance of Showers, a trio of working women whose edgy interactive performances examine a women's place in corporate America. Itís the resident performance collective for pretty blue sky.
 
Another pretty blue sky endeavor is the Empty Lot Performance Project, which has dancers, performance artists, photographers, mainstream theater groups, and even a mime showing their work at parks and other nontraditional venues throughout Chicago.
 
Kies says the idea — a nod to the rapid urbanization of the city ósprung from her day job selling real estate where she often saw new condominium developments replace vacant lots almost overnight.
 
Mae, who has seen two of pretty blue sky's productions, says the organization pulls together all of Kies' talents. "She double majored in French and theater, and was very interested in women's issues and French literature and theater and the idea of theater as a form of communication. So she used many of those ideas to found her company and give it such a strong political and activist sense."
 
Says Kies, "We don't want to make stuff that's just pretty to look at or just says what it needs to say. We want to make something beautiful that has something to say, so that the two are working in tandem." 

Cara Jepsen '86 is a Chicago-based freelance writer.