Pivot Arts to Launch 2026-27 Season With Four Artists-in-Residence and New Works
Kayla Reefer, Mikee Parangalan, and Silvita Diaz Brown are among the Chicago artists developing new work.
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Pivot Arts announced the artists and projects launching its 2026–27 season, opening the new fiscal year with a slate that spans photography, poetry-driven performance, new plays, street dance, and dance-theater. The season introduces four Artists-in-Residence developing new work through the Pivot Arts Festival — Kayla Reefer, Mikee Parangalan, Sarah Bock, and Jessica Leyva — and marks the return of the Made in Chicago Residency for its second iteration, presenting choreographer Silvita Diaz Brown's evening-length Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas.
"Last season's festival made one thing undeniable: the need for development support, especially among communities of color, is urgent," said Jorge Silva, Executive Artistic Director of Pivot Arts. "The 2026 slate continues our commitment to brave, soulful work that pushes into mediums and themes true to Pivot's ethos."
With Traces, multidisciplinary artist and photographer Kayla Reefer turns her lens on lineage, identity, and memory. Building on her ongoing series Identidad — a photographic study of her Afro-Panamanian heritage — Reefer will use her residency to revisit and expand the work into a new body of images, incorporating family archives, experimenting with alternative printmaking and mixed media, and drawing on sound and recollection as tangible acts of remembering. At its heart, the project seeks to redefine narratives and foster belonging for Afro-Latine communities, building an archive that honors ancestry while empowering future generations to embrace their cultural histories.
In The Money Tree, writer and theater artist Mikee Parangalan offers an antidote to despair. Created after the late author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the piece pushes back against the scarcity mindset that capitalism instills, and instead conjures a small, radical proposition: that abundance can arrive with no catch. Tender and hopeful, the work is designed to give audiences a jolt of belief: that they might stumble into something good today.
Playwright Sarah Bock presents What I Wish I Could Say, an abstract new play about the gap between what a young woman says and what she truly means. As she moves through her romantic and platonic relationships, reality plays out in stark white light while bursts of color reveal the honest words she swallows to protect others at her own expense. Caught between kindness, self-advocacy, and the structures that pressure women, and women of color in particular, to lie; she builds toward a single, shockingly honest statement, delivered at last in the plain light of the real.
Chicana dance artist, community leader, and producer Jessica Leyva investigates the meeting point of Chicago's music and street-dance communities. Collaborating with producer and musician e j e c t (Jordan Dismuke), Leyva's project asks a deceptively simple question: what if the dancers are the musicians? Over an intensive week, dancers assigned to elements of a score — bass, clap, snare, synth — will build and record a sound score in real time through freestyle, keeping musicians and movers in active conversation and yielding a live performance model that can live beyond the moment.
MADE IN CHICAGO RESIDENCY — SECOND ITERATION
Pivot Arts also announces the return of its Made in Chicago Residency, which in its second iteration presents choreographer Silvita Diaz Brown's Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas, a full-length dance-theater triptych, four years in the making, that physically embodies the legacies of Mexican women artists who forged creative freedom across centuries of colonial, religious, and patriarchal constraint. The work moves through three interconnected sections centered on the 17th-century poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the painter Frida Kahlo, and Diaz Brown herself, a contemporary Mexican immigrant artist. Sor Juana's intellectual precision and spiritual rebellion take shape through choreography built around the nun's habit; Frida's transformation of pain into radical self-expression informs a visceral, surreal physical world of extended skirts and gesture; and the final section turns to migration, grief, and belonging, revealing dance as a site of healing and agency. Performed by six dancers, the piece weaves contemporary dance, physical theater, bilingual Spanish/English text, original music, and projection into a single layered experience.
Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas was developed and produced through the Made in Chicago Residency, a program of Physical Theater Festival Chicago in partnership with Pivot Arts, the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts at Northwestern University and CLATA's Destinos Festival.
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