Chicago’s Links Hall will permanently close at the end of its current season in June, due to ongoing financial hardships, the venue confirmed Thursday.
Since its founding in 1978 by choreographers Bob Eisen, Carol Bobrow and Charlie Vernon, Links has been a cornerstone of the city’s dance scene, often giving a home to experimental new works that pushed the envelope, both artistically and politically. Links’ Executive Director SK Kerastas said Thursday that the venue will continue with performances scheduled through June, then close up shop over the summer.
Recently, Links was home to a dance piece, “ABORT.” As the title suggests, the work boldly took on abortion. It’s the kind of political, experimental art that Links, where many dancemakers premiere edgy work, has specialized in for nearly a half-century.
Courtesy of Links Hall
Work like this — blunt and fearlessly political, perhaps off-putting to some — is right at home at Links Hall. Founded in 1978 in Lake View and named after a preexisting sign on the building, the dance incubator has more recently shared a space on Western Avenue near Roscoe Village with the music venue Constellation, owned by local jazz impresario and Pitchfork co-founder Mike Reed.
Links has housed a residency program for contemporary choreographers that goes back decades and has featured works from local dancemakers including Erin Kilmurray, Ayako Kato and J’Sun Howard.
“It’s hard to overstate what Links means to Chicago’s dance community,” said Chicago Dancemakers Forum Executive Director Joanna Furnans, who has also staged work at Links. “For many, Links is a home — the sort of incubator home base for the building of dance artists’ careers in this city.”
“Links was integral to the genesis of Chicago Dancemakers Forum,” Furnans added. “We wouldn’t exist without Links Hall.”
But despite its large artistic influence, Links faced an existential crisis, accelerated by a precipitous drop in grants. Last fall, Links announced its Lifeline for Links fundraising campaign, aiming to raise $350,000. As of this week, Kerastas told WBEZ the total had reached about $165,000. The venue went public with the fundraising effort — which was already running in the background — after not receiving a CityArts grant through Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, which Links had gotten for several years. On its website, Links said that change threw the organization into a “dire cash flow situation.”
According to numbers obtained through a public records request, Links received $203,500 in grant dollars from the city between 2019 and 2023, including a one-time, $100,000 grant in 2023 as part of the Chicago Arts Recovery Program.
Historically, Links offered dancemakers a low-cost and at times free place to workshop pieces and stage new work. The year it celebrated its 40th anniversary, it staged a Pay-the-40th-Forward season that donated space to artists rent-free, a lifeline in a city where dance space can cost a premium and be hard to source. While some venues may hope to avoid scrutiny that comes with presenting politically charged art, Links leaned in. The venue also did not shy from promoting works from queer and racially diverse artists.
That sort of vanguard artmaking is at risk, local creatives say, as Trump administration oversight of the National Endowment for the Arts has resulted in a sweep of changes for groups. New grantmaking rules restrict grants from going to groups that promote diversity, equity and inclusion or those that run afoul of executive orders on “gender ideology.” While those changes do not appear to have led to the closure of Links, there is concern in the local arts community that the federal changes will cause a spike in competition for less restrictive local dollars, including from philanthropy.
“I think the goal is to try to get people separate and competing and isolated, to shore up an individualistic ethos even more,” Kerastas told WBEZ last month. “I feel so passionately that that is not the way that we need to be connected.”
Contributing: Graham Meyer
