Charlie Vernon and Sharon Thacker rehearse in Links Hall in the 1980s./Photo: Chuck Osgood

I arrived late to the puppet cabaret, but my friend had kindly saved me a seat. A standing-room crowd filled the larger of two studios housed in an unassuming one-story brick building on Western Avenue—formerly home to the Viaduct Theater (named for the now-demolished Belmont Avenue flyover that once overshadowed it), now for more than a decade jazz presenter Constellation and its tenant: dance and performance-art incubator Links Hall. Tenant, that is, until the end of June, when Links Hall will present live art to the public for the last time.

A cushion on the floor would have suited me fine—preferable, really. It’s the seating I usually choose for performances at Links Hall, where folding chairs are often supplemented by throw pillows arranged in front of the first row. On the ground and as close to the action as possible is usually the best seat in the house—especially at Links, where the intimacy of the space is met by the vulnerability and daringness of the artists who share their work there, many of whom consider audiences important collaborators in the event.

But I didn’t mind having a cushioned chair in Studio B, the room customarily programmed with jazz and experimental music from Constellation. “Nasty, Brutish & Short” reliably fills the house and this was a special occasion: a fifteen(ish)-year retrospective of the inspired cabaret, co-presented by Rough House. The list of sponsors in the footer of the show’s page on Rough House’s website credits the usual local and regional arts funders, along with “weirdos like you.” Turns out there are a lot of us weirdos. I picked my way carefully through the small mob bunched at the entrance and crouched in aisles, most—I imagined—still reeling from the announcement of the impending closure of Links Hall just a few days earlier.

Links’ financial woes were no secret. The organization launched a “Lifeline for Links” campaign last fall, aiming to raise $350,000 to shore up operating costs in the face of an ever-shrinking funding landscape—and this before the change of federal administration and its swift assault on equity and the arts. And yet the announcement email caught me off guard. Maybe it was the nondescript subject line. Or maybe it was the heart emoji at the end: “An Update from Links Hall.” In retrospect, that brevity and aesthetic smacks of a breakup, so perhaps the announcement that the board had voted to sunset the organization as of June 30 shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Regardless, it’s hard news to digest.

For those in Chicago’s dance, performance art, puppetry, experimental and cross-disciplinary performance worlds—pretty much any theater of the non-kitchen-sink variety—the name Links Hall needs no explanation. It’s the spot founded and—for many chapters of its nearly fifty-year life—run by artists who need space to throw things against the wall. Themselves, in some cases.

Take Bob Eisen, the one in a trio of founders who stayed on for over two decades and has remained a supporter of the institution since, reappearing to jog, bounce off walls and handstand in celebration of landmarks like Links’ fortieth and his own seventieth birthdays. The place is synonymous with creative experimentation and risk, and the people who love that kind of art. “It was to me a community center in a way,” says Eisen. “It’s not the biggest thing in the world, but it is important and it’s quite clear it’s a loss. After forty-seven years, there’s a hell of a lot of people who went through there, saw a performance, took a workshop. Something was happening to enrich people’s lives.”

Bob Eisen, Carol Bobrow and Charlie Vernon founded Link Hall performance space in 1978/Photo: Chuck Osgood

A luxury and a good thing to do

In 1978, Bob Eisen, along with Carol Bobrow and Charlie Vernon, started leasing a second-floor room in a Wrigleyville building with “Link’s-Hall”—immortalizing the dentist named Link who built it—mounted to the façade. Eisen and Vernon wanted a new home for their weekly contact improvisation jams (taking place at that time at Facets Multimedia) and got hip to the space via dancer Jim Self, who was renting it for the avant-garde and now-defunct MoMing dance company. Eisen says his memory for a lot of that period is fuzzy, but he clearly recalls the rent: 250 dollars a month. “It was nothing. Even then.”

This enviable rate got the trio a quirky room with wonky electrical wiring, an offstage comprised of three closets, and an El line that drowned out sound every ten minutes. Many artists with ties to the original Links Hall remember it with the fondness reserved for drafty first apartments and hand-me-down beater cars. “When I was producing poetry and fiction readings in the old space, I’d always marvel at how poets would deal with the train passing by,” says percussionist Michael Zerang, who rented the space in its early years and served as Links’ artistic director from 1985 to 1989, when Eisen took a mid-tenure breather. “Some would stop reading. Some would get louder and louder.”

“We didn’t think so much about what we were doing, we were just doing it,” Eisen tells me. In one memorable performance, Eisen had staged a ladder outside the window, climbing onto it and out of view. While on the ladder, he stripped down then returned through the window naked and walked into one of the closets for a costume change.

“Another one I can’t imagine doing now,” Eisen says. “Daniel Scanlon, a wonderful guy and musician who’s since died; I did a dance, and he played harmonica. Then he and I sat on stage and smoked a joint. Someone in the audience also lit up a joint and passed it around. Then we did the same dance again. That was 1981 or something.”

While it’s hard to imagine those events taking place now, the artists drawn to Links over the years never shied away from being iconoclastic, experimental, controversial, radically present, and very real. Take “Abort” from March of this year, KIKI/Kierah King’s raw, personal dance about reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. It’s hard to picture premiering that anywhere other than Links Hall. Links has always been synonymous with boundary-pushing stuff, uncategorizable stuff, in-progress stuff, the stuff that many of us find the most rewarding to experience. And the stuff that’s hardest to fund.

Carol Bobrow rehearses in Links Hall, 1980/Photo: Chuck Osgood

Money was tight to nonexistent from the start. Bobrow and Vernon left Links as their families grew. Eisen remained, running the original space for over twenty years, working banquet gigs as a server to get by and spending a lot of his time in that storied room off Sheffield. “It fit my lifestyle,” he says. “I could let people in, I could organize the schedule, keep the place clean. But I spent a lot of time by myself there dancing, which is a luxury and a good thing to do.”

Twenty-two years later, when Eisen decided it was time to move on, his identity was so entwined with Links Hall, he felt he had to leave Chicago entirely. “I couldn’t get away from it. I was Mr. Links. Not that I’m complaining about that. I was somebody. I moved to New York in 2000 and was nobody.

“I’m still nobody,” he adds lightly.

Bob Eisen

A new mandate

The new millennium brought new leadership and growing ambitions. Eisen asked dancer Asimina Chremos to be his successor. Chremos says that while she had no previous experience as an artistic director, she did have clear ideas about how to professionalize Links, shifting it from a rental house to a presenting organization—with “organize” being the functional part of the term. “There was no computer. The phone would ring, and someone would ask what’s happening at Links that weekend. I would say, ‘Someone has rented it for their show, but I don’t have any information about it.’ We need to create a calendar, we need the box-office money to go through our bank account so we can show what we’re doing, we need to have contracts with artists.”

Chremos set to work on systems; she secured a grant for computers and internet access, enlisted the help of a neighboring business to create a website, and established a work-trade program for artists to rehearse and present in exchange for studio cleaning and other tasks. Membership in the National Performance Network opened creative exchange and presentation opportunities beyond Chicago. Chremos worked to raise the public profile of Links for five years, making it less of an “in-crowd, speakeasy kind of place.” She also wanted Links to have an “aesthetic mandate” with a focus on dance.

“Unfortunately, during my tenure I trashed the budget,” she says. “And the board ripped me a new asshole. I said, ‘Look, you didn’t ask for a résumé. We didn’t go through a formal hiring process. You’d just been saying yes to Bob Eisen for twenty years.’ They intelligently named the next person executive director. I learned my lessons through the fire and moved on.”

Chremos moved on to Time Out Chicago where she says she learned new lessons in other frying pans as its dance editor. And while Chremos is the first to admit her shortcomings in plain terms, she also owns her significant contributions to a transformative period for Links. She says, “The executive director who followed me had real chops and elevated the organization to a more professional state, but I feel I laid a good groundwork for him to do that.”

CJ Mitchell

CJ Mitchell, the executive director with the chops, agrees. “Asimina had built on what had come before. Everything was seeded already and allowed to develop,” he tells me via Zoom from his home in England. Mitchell was the first person in leadership at Links who was not a practicing artist. He is, however, a gifted administrator with a deep appreciation for experimental work, to this day producing works by his spouse Karen Christopher, a former core member of performance-art group Goat Island.

Under Mitchell’s steady hand, programming expanded. Monthlong festivals curated by artistic associates took place three times each year. New funding from trusts and foundations helped pay for a growing staff. The National Performance Network membership funded commissioned work. All this took place alongside the artists and groups that had rented the space for years. This included the Contact Improv jam, a tai chi group, Poonie’s Cabaret—founded by dancer Poonie Dodson, who died of AIDS in the 1990s. “One thing that amazed me was how much was happening on a daily basis, morning, noon and night,” Mitchell reflects. “We had four to five different groups in a day, seven days a week.”

Vestiges of the early Links operational ethos persisted, as these things often do. “The number of people who had keys to the space across the city was something I could never get a handle on,” Mitchell says. “There was a time we realized a musician had a key to the space and was using it to rehearse in the middle of the night. It was not someone we had any contact with. It wasn’t out of control; people were very respectful of the start and end time they booked. It was just kind of part and parcel of how people supported the space.”

It was in this era, the 2000s, that the ambitions of Links Hall visibly outgrew its humble space. The first annual Thaw spring fundraiser party was held. Chremos partnered with the MCA and the Dance Center of Columbia College to create the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, which provides large, no-strings grants and residencies to several dance artists each year. The board grew with well-connected and hard-working directors, including Ginger Farley, who became the director of Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Links’ Co-Mission residency was born—a program that, by my count, has incubated the work of 114 emerging artists and their collaborators across twenty-two years.

But the location was becoming an issue. Rent in Wrigleyville was no longer $250 a month and the second-floor walkup, with no elevator, a poor electrical system and an increasingly hostile landlord, had lost its shine. “The old space became incredibly expensive for what it was,” says Zerang, who served on the board after leaving his post as artistic director in 1989, until 2013. “It was charming to have the train outside the window until you’re paying $5,000 per month in rent.”

Mitchell says finding a new home was always on the agenda, but it would take stars aligning—a generous donor, landlord or partnership—to finance such a move. A seven-year search (which Zerang says he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy) spanned Mitchell’s stint and extended into the term of the next director Roell Schmidt.

Schmidt came on in 2009, when the United States was reeling from the Great Recession. Artists were struggling even more than usual, and space rental was down. Schmidt says she responded by matchmaking artists who might be interested in performing on a shared bill, or finding other ways to collaborate on a dime.

“Anything takes energy, will and imagination,” Schmidt tells me. “It all worked. A lot of people were able to pour in those three necessary ingredients.”

By 2013 Links Hall was back to a full calendar and again overflowing its container when stars aligned with Constellation.

Roell Schmidt/Photo: Joe Mazza, Brave Lux

Links Hall after Link’s-Hall

Mike Reed wasn’t looking to open a venue. The Pitchfork Festival founder just needed more space for administration and storage. Running a presenting house didn’t seem practical, he tells me, “Especially for the type of music I’m interested in producing—jazz and improvised music.”

But Reed and Schmidt were placed by DCASE commissioner Michelle Boone and fate onto the City’s Cultural Advisory Council at the same time. They got to talking. Links was looking for a new studio to rent, and the Viaduct Theater was vacating the building on Western Avenue—a building with two theater spaces and a bar. Revenue from a tenant and bar sales made running a venue feasible. The cohabitation of dance and music improvisors under the same roof—mingling at the bar, cross-pollinating audiences, collaborating—made it too good to pass up. “If we could bring all those things many people consider fringe together, we’d have a full plate,” Reed says. “Something created by people and not by a foundation. It was like it was destined to happen. It was too good to be true. I had taken the idea to some investment banker friends of mine to talk me out of it and they all said no, it was a good idea.”

Reed purchased the building, with Links Hall renting the smaller white-box theater near the entrance and Constellation programming the larger black-box theater past the bar. The word Constellation was painted in large blue letters above the windows. Links Hall appears in bright orange letters on the right. The Links community said farewell to their namesake building off Sheffield. Columbia College dance professor and two-time Bessie winner Darrell Jones organized a final improvised performance in the old Links. The contact improv group danced the two-and-a-half miles from the old location to the new.

“It was a marriage made in heaven,” Zerang says. “Both of my worlds were in the same space.” The marriage of those worlds pollinated a superbloom of collaboration through the 2010s.There’s Instigation Festival, the improvised music and dance series co-founded by dancer and Links employee Marie Casimir and guitarist Steve Marquette, which continues each year in Chicago and New Orleans. One high-profile collaboration both Reed and Schmidt mention fondly is their 2015 co-commission of composer and saxophonist Greg Ward and dance artist Onye Ozuzu—at the time dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College—to reimagine Charles Mingus’ album “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.” The production brought fifteen dancers and Chicago’s top jazz improvisers together on the Pritzker Pavilion stage in Millennium Park. “More than 8,500 people came to that concert,” Schmidt says dreamily. “I was floating.”

The legacy programs continued, but now in a better-equipped, flexible room with a sprung floor. Perhaps the most iconic of these is Zerang and Hamid Drake’s annual solstice sunrise concerts. Each December, bleary, half-dreaming attendees sit by candlelight as the two friends drum in the dawn, moving from hand-percussion instruments to full kits, guided by the energy of the room and each other, summoning daylight to creep through papered windows. The concerts conclude with reflections from Drake that unfold with the same warmth, sensitivity and improvised authenticity as the music. This year is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the solstice concerts, also the year Drake celebrates his seventieth birthday. Zerang assures me the concerts will continue to take place in the building, though no longer under the auspices of Links Hall.

Schmidt served as director for a decade—the longest tenure besides Bob Eisen. She and the rest of the Links’ staff at the time—Marie Casimir, Brett Swinney (recently named director of exhibitions at DCASE), Felicia Holman (co-founder of Honey Pot Performance) and Anna Trier—continued to nurture the growing programming while putting a new effort on making the resources at Links more accessible to underserved artists and artists of color.

When the fortieth anniversary rolled around, Schmidt approached it with a philosophy of abundance and gratitude. Rent and technician fees were suspended so artists could keep all ticket sales. Artists in turn were invited to “Pay the Fortieth Forward” by selling raffle tickets, house managing each other’s performances, or writing about them for Performance Response Journal. The season encapsulated the spirit of Links: generosity, mutual aid and collaboration in the service of groundbreaking work.

Schmidt and Links Hall were selected as Newcity’s “Player of the Moment” that year. When I interviewed her for the feature, she shared something off the record: she would be resigning at the end of the season. She was burnt out and the time had come to move on. The rest of the staff exited with her. Stephanie Pacheco was hired as the new director. Seven months later, the world went into pandemic lockdown.

A recipe of many factors

SK Kerastas had performed at the old Links Hall in their twenties. “I have memories of waiting off stage in a closet to enter,” they recall. Kerastas moved to the Bay Area and returned to Chicago in 2023. They were excited to see how much Links had grown and changed. When they applied for the executive director role, they knew it would be a heavy lift: Pacheco had left abruptly, after steering the organization through the pandemic storm. “Part of my interview was launching a two-year capital campaign,” Kerastas says. “I came into an unstable situation and said yes to that work.”

But there were unpleasant surprises. Unbeknownst to Kerastas, the lease with Constellation had expired and the relationship with Reed deteriorated under the pressures of the pandemic. (As Reed puts it to me, “If I was once in a marriage, I now have a weird roommate.”) Kerastas says they were able to resolve the rental issues with Constellation, but the organization kept being dealt blow after financial blow. Arts funding continued (and continues and continues) to shrink. Expected grants were not coming through. The final hit was the loss of a general operating grant from DCASE, one that Links had received steadily for the last seven years.

The organization was forced to let a staff member go. The “Lifeline for Links” campaign was making progress—about halfway to the $350,000 goal—but the worsening grant landscape heightened uncertainty. “We were preparing for the second [fundraising] wave and were getting feedback that people wanted messaging about a plan,” Kerastas says. “We didn’t have enough information to say, ‘Yes, we’re here to stay.’”

The board explored other pathways, including a possible merger that would come with some funding. It looked promising until the potential partner diverted funds to emergency non-arts sources through 2025—a phenomenon that arts organizations may remember from the first Trump administration. Kerastas says the immediate cash-flow gap became too big to straddle. “We felt it was more accountable to make the decision early so we could close with dignity and intention, to direct resources to the archive, to take care of staff transitions, and to give people space to say goodbye.”

Charlie Vernon rehearses in Links Hall in the 1980s/Photo: Chuck Osgood

Dance forever

After taking my seat, one of the first acts I caught was by Tom Lee. Lee is a master of the traditional Japanese puppetry form Bunraku. His piece opened with a voiceover memento mori. “How many more times will you see the full moon rise? Maybe twenty, but it all seems so limitless.”

It is now possible to count how many more times one can see a performance at Links Hall. As of this writing, there are two more Co-Mission works-in-progress showings; an edition of the dance and music mix-n-match improv series “Freedom From, Freedom To,”; an interdisciplinary performance by Grayscale Dance; one more “Nasty, Brutish & Short”; a presentation from Butoh Curious Chi described as “not for the attention-seeking economy” (thank you!) on the calendar.

More will be added by the time this reaches print. As I’m writing, I get distracted by Instagram and see Po’Chop (a 2017 Links Hall Co-Mission resident) and Switch the Boi Wonder will have a special edition of their “Notes on Masculinity” drag-king show—one of my favorite ongoing events in the city—at Links at the end of May. Kerastas tells me that many artists will return to perform one last time. I’m glad to see Jenn Freeman/Po’Chop is among them. Kerastas says they don’t have details on a culminating event, but Links’ last day, June 30, will be “a long day of ritual and performance opportunity for artists to touch the boards.”

Until then, the Chicago Contact Improv jam takes place at Links every Sunday. Naomi Oster and Chrissy Martin respond to the email I sent to the Chicago CI collective’s address. On a three-way call, they tell me that touching the boards is ritual at CI jams. “We have been closing the jam the same way for forty-seven years,” Oster says. “We get into a circle, take a few breaths together, put our hands on the ground and shout, ‘Dance forever!’”

The CI collective, which welcomes participants of any-to-no dance experience, is on the hunt for their next home. Constellation may be a possibility—Reed is interested in supporting some of the legacy programs, though he says he needs to consider what model can reliably fill the hole left by Links’ rent. Oster tells me Chicago Contact Improv is considering short- and long term options, creating a “space force” to search for new locations. “We’ve been talking about how to host a jam in a violently segregated city and address some access needs the space of Links hasn’t been able to meet for us,” they say. “We’re trying to go about this intentionally.”

In a story about the closure by WBEZ, Joanna Furnans, the current director of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, says that organization wouldn’t exist without Links Hall. Reed says the same of Constellation. Many dance companies established in the last forty-plus years could echo the sentiment. Thousands of artists conducted explorations within its walls and scores can credit Links as a springboard to mature and flourishing practices. Links may not be continuing, but the creative communities nurtured there are.

Martin who, in addition to the CI Jam, is a collaborator in Amanda Maraist’s current Co-Mission residency, puts it well. “Links has built a community around it that expands beyond its walls. Everyone who has been involved with Links who is committed to artistic practice is going to keep dancing, is going to dance forever. Links’ legacy will live on with anyone who enjoyed the space.”