Sunday in The Square: A Mini-Festival of Storytelling, Music, and More

If you have a story, poem, song, or dance inside of you, we'd love for you to let it out on our festival stage. There's no pressure, judgment, or scoring, just enthusiasm for you choosing to express yourself. Slots will be 7 minutes long, strictly enforced. We'd request no profanity or gratuitous material, as this is an open, public area. You can sign up by the side of the stage before this session, and we will draw names for participants. We hope to get 6-7 people a spot in the showcase.

setting here (on the lawn, in-person, Sundays at 5pm). 

From Chicago's West side to Stanford, from poet to emcee, Linda Sol (Melinda Hernandez) is a multifaceted artist whose life is a puzzle time continues to solve. From a young age, she took interest in instruments and poetry through her participation in Kuumba Lynx, an after school matters program using the arts to build community and love. Her work with the pen has led her to the Indy and Team final stage in Louder than a Bomb 2017 as well as the final stage in CUPSI 2018 and 2019. Her poems have since been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now as well as featured in "The End of Chiraq: a Literary Mixtape" and "The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT". A passion for lyricism and an ear for music eventually birthed an emcee. A handful of singles and an EP later, Sol has had the pleasure of opening for artists such as 2 Chainz, Ella Mai, Shangela, Dreezy, A.Chal, Samaria, and Mereba as well as performing for Lollapalooza 2020. She is currently working on developing her craft and shooting more music videos. Feel free to check out her music on Soundcloud or Spotify, and stop by her youtube to see her first couple of visuals (@_lindasol) 

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Sue Fink has been enchanting audiences since 2001 with her whimsical perspective on the world. She is a witty social commentator and perceptive observer of the human condition. Her genre, which she calls “urban campfire cabaret,” is folk with a hint of jazz, a large dollop of humor, and a drop of sadness for good measure.  Her songs are played on folk radio stations nationwide, and her “Alternate Universe” song was used in an episode of This American Life.  She curated the Virtual Dream Café performance series during the pandemic, and most recently she recorded her two cicada-related songs on a specially designed cicada-shaped flash drive, aka the “Cicada Suite.”

If you have a story, poem, song, or dance inside of you, we'd love for you to let it out on our festival stage. There's no pressure, judgment, or scoring, just enthusiasm for you choosing to express yourself. Slots will be 7 minutes long, strictly enforced. We'd request no profanity or gratuitous material, as this is an open, public area. You can sign up by the side of the stage before this session, and we will draw names for participants. We hope to get 6-7 people a spot in the showcase.

A National Storytelling Network Circle of Excellence Oracle Award recipient, Beth Horner is a 40-year nationally touring spoken word artist.  Sought after as both a storytelling performance and teaching artist, Beth has performed multiple times at the National Storytelling Festival, for NASA, on Live From National Geographic, for the International Art of Storytelling Festival, the Starlight Educational Foundation of Taiwan and for Lyrics & Lore: A Weekend with Songwriters & Storytellers at Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort. She served as narrative consultant for NASA/Johnson Space Center’s Story Mining project for which she collected the stories of the scientists behind the Apollo Space Missions.

4Spiel is a consortium of Chicago area musicians committed to stretching the boundaries and expectations of chamber music. With a string quartet at its core, the group reinterprets classic works along with giving voice to contemporary and new work across all genres. 4Spiel is Margaret Daley (cello), Carmen Llop Kassinger (violin),  Lisa Fako (violin), and Monica Reilly (viola).

Join us as some of Chicago's finest tellers of personal narratives take to the stage to share some memorable stories. This is a reprise of our showcase that has sold out in the square 8 times over the last year, featuring an all new cast including Scott Whitehair, Ali Siddiqui, Betsey Manzoni, Louis Greenwald, and Lupe Nunez.