Jessica Anne,(she/her); Deidre Huckabay (they/them); Mabel Kwan (she/her) 

The Newly Formed Trio is a multidisciplinary group sprung from working first in 2021, when they each experienced a specific loss: a father, a brother, and a kitty. Originally they came together to create a piece Taxi Festival. In devising they discovered a new creative practice that supports healing and promotes death. The trio’s new practice incorporates casual dialogue, interview, sleep, tarot, deconstructed piano, and mylar. 

The Project

HCL is supporting the Newly-Formed Trio as Fellows to develop material created in 2022 into a full-length performance using music, dance, and text, with the premiere anticipated for late 2023. The artists plan to offer several in-progress performances with talks. Seeding their final work is a volume of recordings of their candid talks with one another since 2022 and earlier, from their original work premiered at Ear Taxi Festival. They envision that the experience which gradually brought profound solace, and eventually inspiration to organize as Newly Formed Trio, is the foundation for NFT’s permanent commitment to slowness, to patience, to gentleness as a radical and new creative practice. This includes dedicating studio time during the Fellows year for maintaining their individual writing, music, and movement practice.

2022 Open Labs: Grief Dreams

The Newly Formed Trio ( Deidre Huckabary, Mabel Kwan, Jessica Anne) presents Grief Dreams, a private overnight showing for 10 attendees invited by the Trio. 

DMJ+, assemble like minded artists and healers for a guided sleepover in an attempt at collective dream-making/spirit-reaching as part of their ongoing field research on dying, ritual, and long-grieving.

Open Labs: Grief Dreams, 2022 | Photo Credit: Mallory Yanhan Qiu

About the Artists

Jessica Anne, writer, is a Neo-Futurist alumna. She is the author of A Manual For Nothing (Noemi Press), Sex With My Family (Forthcoming, Long Day Press) and she edits Nonfiction for MAKE Literary Magazine. Jessica Anne teaches at SAIC and is currently a Visiting Professor at Roosevelt University. Jessica Anne played Rebecca Gibbs in Our Town, in the basement of the Chopin Theatre, directed by David Cromer.

Deidre Huckabay is a flutist and performance artist living in Chicago. They are one of eleven Co-Artistic Directors at Mocrep and a co-owner of the experimental cassette tape label Parlour Tapes+. They also co-curate the We Series at Elastic Arts with Lia Kohl. They believe that liberation from delusion and suffering is possible in every lifetime, for every living being, and that art either opens a gate or closes it.

Mabel Kwan is a pianist and specializes in contemporary music. She plays with Ensemble Dal Niente, Restroy, Fifth Season, Mega Laverne and Shirley, and Uluuul. Mabel is a 2017 3Arts Awardee, 2018 High Concept Labs Artist, and 2020 City of Chicago Esteemed Artist. Her interest in art and music began at an early age when she started accompanying her father on lieder, arias, and Chinese folk songs. Mabel brings together the intuitive, strange, and song-like in her experimental performances.