When your country is destroyed, your ordinary language reflects this destruction.

Dear friends and supporters,

I began these newsletters two years ago with an interruption. I, like so many, set aside initial intentions. Something more urgent than my plans presented itself, made its demands on my attention and words. Two years later, we still wait for many of those plans to materialize. Now another relentless incursion arrives with its unforgiving imperatives, and I again, and like so many, find myself sidelining the initial draft of a correspondence. Once again, we start again.

For those unfamiliar with Chicago geography, I will offer a brief sketch of the city’s pocket in which Every house has a door has always located itself. We keep our headquarters at the meeting place of three neighborhoods: Wicker Park, Humboldt Park, and Ukrainian Village. When I arrived in Chicago for the first time around 1980, most of the signs on bars and shops in Wicker Park were in Polish, and most of the conversations that one overheard were spoken in Polish as well. The first phrase I learned appeared on every neighborhood bar: zimne pivo (cold beer). With all the changes over the years, one does not hear Polish spoken or see it written in Wicker Park anymore, and few corner bars remain. The park at the center took its name from alderman Charles Wicker who in 1870, along with his brother Joel, donated the four-acre parcel to the city for the express purpose of it becoming a public park. During the first World War, the provisional government of Poland convened in Wicker Park. Humboldt Park to the west of Wicker takes its name from the German naturalist Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander Von Humboldt. The history of this vast 197-acre park includes Danish immigrant Jens Jensen, who, as General Superintendent and Chief Landscape Architect, around 1905, designed a meandering river-like extension of the existing lagoon, with hidden water sources under landscaped rocks. Jensen designated an area that abuts the lagoon at a diagonal as a music court for dances, concerts and special events. He commissioned Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin to design a majestic refectory building and boat house, with prominent arches that open like a loggia in two directions, that still stands at one end of the historic music court. The City of Chicago has accepted our proposal to perform an open-air version of our work Aquarium there, under those arches, and the Park District will support this free event on Sunday afternoon September 11. This was our unpremiered work from two years ago, returning now as Broken Aquarium, a performance in the aftermath of so much turmoil and suffering, returning in the form of an outdoor public event.

The Humboldt Park area, named for a German polymath who loved nature, has over the years become a Latin American enclave. Two 55-foot tall, 56-foot wide metal sculptural arches in the form of waving flags of Puerto Rico, created by architects from DeStefano + Partners, McClier Company and Rodriguez Associates, demarcate the stretch of Division Street known as Paseo Boricua that partly bisects the park. Erected in 1995, the flags acknowledge the social, political, and economic transformations of the area that began in the aftermath of the Division Street riots of June 1966, after conflicts, violence, and sustained confrontations between Chicago Police and the Puerto Rican community.

The heart of Ukrainian Village lies just south of Humboldt. Walk in this neighborhood and you will hear Ukrainian spoken by many people whom you pass. At election time, we who live here vote at the Columbus School. Now small blue and yellow ribbons adorn the school’s fenceposts, representing the colors of the flag of Ukraine. Christina Gumenyak, a sixth grader at the school, says, “I have my grandma, two uncles, a couple of friends in Ukraine. And my aunt.” Robin Vallejo, a teacher’s assistant, has worked at the school for more than forty years. She is Puerto Rican, born and raised in Ukrainian Village. She decorated the fence with the ribbons. “We are a big family,” she says. “We treat all nations, all nationalities like they are our own kids.”

This is how people in our neighborhood talk about the war. When they are not talking about their relatives who live there, they talk mostly about children: the children of Ukraine who cannot escape the destruction, and the invading Russian troops of the first incursions, so many of them so young, slightly older than children themselves, sent on a violent mission under false pretenses, with false information, lied to and sacrificed. So the war invades not only a land far away, but the thoughts and the speech of so many in these Chicago neighborhoods.

Back around 1980, I remember hearing for the first time The Great Gate of Kyev, the virtuoso work for solo piano from the suite Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. I looked at the rendering of the The Bogatyr Gates on the album cover of the vinyl record (all there was in those days). I loved classical music as much as whatever current noise the punk authorities behind the counter of Wax Trax! Records over on North Lincoln Avenue recommended. I pictured the parents of my father’s mother departing through the gates. I had been told they left Kyiv for new horizons in the US, eventually drawn by work in the auto industry to settle in Flint Michigan where I was born. Such industry seemed to link the old world to the new. People migrated with their languages, customs, and religions intact. I read Isaac Babel, writing from Odessa. Now I’m reading Lyuba Yakimchuk writing from Kyiv. I’m listening, or trying to, to the children who have grown up too quickly, whose childhoods have been interrupted. I am trying to comprehend that interruption and to speak from it.

What does that have to do with performance, with our small practice, as we find our way back to a public stage, navigating the sporadic calms like stepping stones between every disconsolate interruption? When we at Every house framed our mission in part as intergenerational, we did not anticipate that it might take this direction, that these children would in this way become our teachers. Back to what stabilities, what fundamentals, does our practice continually lead us? Circumstances of geography, voices of children, earliest renewals of spring: in space, in time, nothing is far away. Everything that happens takes us with it, tests us in our  devotion, our creativity and our love, for one another and for peace.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg
Every house has a door