THRIVAL
A sonic and performance-based work rooted in themes of transformation
Doors at 6:00
Performance at 7:00
8:00: Decompress, expand , thrive!
This performance-based work is rooted in themes of transformation, resilience, and renewal. The work deconstructs the sounds of survival—laughs, cries, sighs, whoops, screams, long notes, harmonies, and rhythms—and uses them as foundational elements to explore the journey from merely surviving to truly thriving. It weaves in themes of baptism and renewal, asking how we collectively navigate and transcend the challenges that define survival.
Access Services
Contact Definition Theater to learn more about the accessibility of the venue.
Lineup
Carissa Lee (2025-2026 HCL Artist in Residence)
Creator + Performer
Carissa Lee Pinckney is a Chicago- and Los Angeles-based performance, sound, and theatrical artist. She earned her BFA in Theater from NYU and MFA in Performance from SAIC. Is a founding member of Suspended Culture art collective, which has performed at the bell hooks symposium and received the DCASE Performing Arts Grant. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Quebec City. She was a 2025 High Concept Labs fellow, 2024 High Concept Labs Artist in Residence and a 2023 Elastic Arts Dark Matter Resident.
She developed THRIVAL, an improvisational theatrical work exploring sonic technologies that help people thrive. Her writing has appeared in Mental Realness Magazine, and on Gray Area Stories podcast.
The content of her work explores Blackness, intergenerational trauma, family archives, and mental health. She integrates recordings, writing, and Black Southern culture to materialize grief, isolation, and hope.
Kezia Waters
Artistic collaborator + Performer
Kezia Waters is a Storyteller/ Performance Artist located in Chicago, IL. Their work lives between the worlds of ethnography, folklore, ritual and the living archive. Through surrealism they try to find things that are Holy, Whole, and Holds. A humanist fairy. They have performed in the Biennale d’art Performative de Rouyn-Noranda of Canada, Dazibao Gallery in Montreal and Recto- Verso in Ouebec City and numerous galleries around Chicago. Kezia was a 2023 In-Session Fellow at ThreeWalls, studying the Performance and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston and also an Adjunct Professor of Acting & African American Theatre at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. He is also a founding member of Suspended Culture a Chicago based gallery performance collective.
Avreeayl Ra
Percussion
Avreeayl has performed and /or recorded with Fred Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Fontella Bass, Lester Bowie, Ari Brown, Oscar Brown, Jr., Henry Butler, Henry Byrd ("Professor Longhair"), Hamid Drake, Malachi Favors, Donald Raphael Garrett, Charles Gayle, Henry Grimes, Billy Harper, Joseph Jarman, Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Nicole Mitchell, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Malachi Thompson, and many more. Avreeayl considers himself greatly blessed to have come up in the richly progressive Chicago “avant-garde” jazz community. Though he has lived briefly in New Orleans and New York and has toured widely in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Far East, and Africa, he has always returned home to live in Chicago. Besides playing and recording music, these days Avreeayl devotes much of his time and phenomenal energy to documenting on film the hidden spiritual roots of Chicago music, focusing on the Congo Beach Initiative (which was inspired by Congo Beach in New Orleans). This is a drum- and spirit-centered society in which Chicago musicians, dancers, and artists of all descriptions, young and elders alike, have congregated for many years at 63rd Street and Lakefront, playing music and practicing their spiritual and healing arts throughout the night, while developing an undying, evolving, spontaneous, organic communal life based in the rhythms, sounds, images, and spirituality of the African-American soul.
Kierah King
Choreographer + Performer
Kierah {KIKI} King (they/them) is a Chicago-based dancer, choreographer, and facilitator whose work centers Black, queer, and community-rooted practices. They hold a BFA in Dance with a minor in Black World Studies from Columbia College Chicago (2020).
Kiki’s work intertwines social justice, activism, and collective joy through performance, choreography, and film, often drawing from social dance, political gesture, and communal gathering as sites of embodied knowledge and storytelling. Kiki’s choreographic and film work has been supported by Columbia College Chicago, Columbia University Beyond the Bars Festival, the 3Arts Make A Wave Grant, Synapse Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 6018 | North, and Links Hall.
Produced with support from High Concept Labs.