All timeline stories.Timeline Stories
Celebrate The City
Celebrate the City was a three-week festival of music, dance, and theater designed to help raise much needed funds for Free Street as its original grant from the city ran out. Guess what! We’re still fundraising, though not sure our posters are as cool as this...
Numaro
To be honest, we’re still learning more about NUMARO, which started as the Free Street Band but spun off on its own in 1977. Read about them here.
The Storyfront Brings “Tiendita Theater” to Back of the Yards
Free Street opened our Storyfront in Back on the Yards in Spring 2017. Designed as both a story gathering site as well as a performance/program space, the Storyfront is as example of not settling for what already exists! Read more about it here or here ...
Free Street Founder Patrick Henry dies
From the Chicago Tribune, April 16th, 1989: “Patrick Henry, founder and director of the Free Street Theatre of Chicago, died Saturday in St. Joseph Hospital after a long illness… Mr. Henry, 53, a native of Portland, Ore., was a fifth-generation descendant...
Studs Terkel narrates Free Street Documentary
This documentary, created circa 1973, is our favorite thing to watch whenever we feel blue! Can’t you just feel the joyful early days of Free Street, when everyone was dancing and singing in the park?
Night of the Living Moms
“Night of the Living Moms!” was an interdisciplinary showcase curated by Artist-in-Residence Lani Montreal. Featured artists explored the tension between being a mother and being an artist, in short pieces that were funny, complicated, and highly relatable...
Checkmate
From taking a stand in the cafeteria to taking a stand in the government, Free Streets youth artists present a new play that asks how do you make change when you cant vote?Both a toolkit and a call to action, CHECKMATE explores the impact of youth-led movements on...
Lily Be’s No Hay Mal
Own your truth. Own your sh*t. Own your story. Raw, straight from the hip, and only mildly filtered, Lily Be’s one-woman show NO HAY MAL was a fast and furious cheat guide to creating and being for anyone who has ever felt knocked down, rejected, or flat-out...
100 Hauntings
Based on real Chicago ghost stories, this multimedia performance asks what–and who– is haunting Chicago. An elevator operator named Jorge doesn’t know he’s dead. A passive aggressive ghost defends his territory at the corner of Division and...