Support Halcyon

Greetings from Halcyon Theatre! We hope that you have had a great year. We wanted to share with you our journey over the last year and where we are going from here! We are on a great path- we are doing work that few in the country are doing. We've been fortunate to receive support from several foundations and organizations, but what really drives our work is Your Support. Help us continue to make a difference in the Chicago community.

When we began the year, Halcyon was in a fairly precarious position. We were in-between stages of growth and had several organizational challenges to address.

“Think Big. Build Simple. Act Now.”

That’s a saying from a coffee cup Tony won . Not super fancy, but it’s a pretty good reminder of how to grow. It’s easy to get caught up in the trappings of building an organization, and to forget what is really important. It almost broke us. We had forgotten the “build simple” part.

We have stabilized our financial position and are working on implementing more sustainable revenue streams for when we are not producing a mainstage work or the festival. Thanks to the support we received from The Alphawood Foundation, we were also able to purchase lighting, sound and video equipment that helped us exponentially expand our technical capabilities. We now rent the equipment out to other companies, turning it into a modest source of revenue.

Additionally, we were able to secure a .05% interest long-term loan from a previous board member to restructure our previous debt; most had remained on a credit card. The loan has no interest if paid off in the first two years, which is a vast improvement over the credit card whose interest was steadily approaching 30%. This also helped further shore up our financial position.

We rotated two board members off the board and added two who are a much better fit. We ventured into new areas of fundraising; and expanded the reach of our mission by helping aligned organizations with their web development by sharing our knowledge. We introduced a Company Manager and Casting Director to the team. Support from the Donnelly Foundation helped us navigate that change.

With the help of the Arts and Business Council of Chicago, we just completed a marketing plan focused on next summer’s Alcyone Festival that can serve as a working template for future marketing planning. It’s the most complete marketing plan we’ve had to date and is another big step forward for us.

Trickster was a huge show, and while not a perfect script, it highlighted some of the best of what Halcyon can do. It allowed for our company to grow as artists by leaps and bounds, forging new skill sets and further developing over 20 talented artists. Johanna Middleton, an actor that worked on the project, said, "Every rehearsal I learned something new."

One significant challenge that we repeatedly ran into, however, was that many of the actors in the show had difficulty working in a style outside of naturalism and emotional realism, the predominant American forms of acting. It was a big learning experience for us--once the reality of the production phase loomed, a great deal of the work we had done dissipated. The show lost much of its uniqueness and clarity, as what would have worked in a different performance style fell flat as naturalism.

That became the inspiration for our Compass Lab, which is set up to explore different modes of performance and training with a group of actors. Working over months we will further explore what we began with Trickster in terms of performance style, and hone our visual aesthetic. It is open to company members and guest artists. The lab began in August and will restart in the new year with an even more focused approach.

Caridad Svich's Iphigenia... (a rave Fable) was the most technically demanding show we had done to date. The technical aspects of the production including enhanced lighting, multiple video projectors running in tandem, live video feeds and sixty minutes of original music. The most frequent compliment we received was "I've never seen anything like that onstage."

We had thought, and had gotten a lot of encouraging advice, that moving to a more mainstream venue would be a step up in visibility for us. The kind of thing arts orgs are supposed to do. And the hope was that our regular audience members would agree. The added cost of moving to a mainstream theatre we thought would be balanced out by additional ticket sales from the higher visibility. Our revenue went up, but it was only enough to keep pace with the additional cost of rent.

Because of space availability, our production calendar was squeezed together way too close from show to show. Space had begun dictating what we did artistically. Doing Iphigenia so close to Trickster also hampered our ability to market both well. We learned that we were pushing too hard, too fast, and it did not create the best working environment. We realized that as we do not have a permanent space, we have the luxury of time, if we take it.

The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 was Remixed, creating new works by women based off of classical texts by women. Instead of picking scripts that have already been written, we picked some of our favorite writers (J. Nicole Brooks, Jennifer Fawcett, EM Lewis Coya Paz and Caridad Svich). While we couldn't afford to commission, we committed to producing them. It was our first time working with writers on pieces specifically written for Halcyon, and we learned a great deal from it.

Our 6th Season opened with Family Devotions. We were able to work with The Goodman and Silk Road, who were also producing plays by David Henry Hwang, to promote “The Summer of Hwang,” and were fortunate enough to be able to cross-promote Family Devotions to such an extent that 75% of the audience were seeing their first Halcyon show. David came to a rehearsal, and even rewrote a scene in rehearsal.

In addition to our Mainstage work, we have had the opportunity to start and be involved with many projects over the past year. On September 11, 2011, Halcyon Theatre and Caffeine Theatre were honored to be asked by Caridad Svich to present a reading of Return to the Upright Position. It is an online text collaboration written during the six months after 9/11/01 by fourteen writers and edited by Caridad. It was the first co-presentation we’ve done and also the first event we livestreamed on the internet. Both were testing grounds for future work.

As part of the DCA Incubator Series, a program designed to support the creation of new work by Chicago theater companies, Halcyon Theatre presented The Americans, by Coya Paz. Since appearing in The Incubator Series, The Americans has gone to have three more independent performances, and continues to evolve. It is the first time we have experienced the thrill of having a piece that we helped shepherd the creation of leave the nest and fly on its own.

Building off what we have done, and using Alcyone 11 and the Incubator as testing grounds, we’re starting a playwriting lab that is a cross between play development in the vein of The Lark in New York and the methods of Irene Fornes’ playwrighting lab with INTAR. It’s called The Nest. The two overarching philosophies will be: work on new plays must be about helping the artists amplify their own voice free from an organizational aesthetic being imposed upon them; works must go up on their feet so writers can see their plays coming to life.

Because our audience, our artists, and our work are so diverse, we’ve been able to learn about and see an incredible array of different performance disciplines and traditions. We created The Ceyx Series to highlight those artists. Performances are once a month, and are also livestreamed.

What we have done since the beginning is advocacy through performance. It took us six years to realize that was what to call it, but it’s been there from the start. The year was not without its challenges, but we are in a significantly stronger position than we were last year. For lack of a better metaphor, in some ways the past year has been like the crouching just before taking a leap. Your continued support allowed us to stabilize many parts of our organization and solidify a base for really exciting continued growth. We are very grateful for that.

No matter how small or large, your contribution will help: While we know that not many people have $100,000, many do have $100, and even more have $10. If everyone on our mailing list gave a donation of $10, it would pay the budget for one of our mainstage shows.

We thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you this season!

Sincerely,