Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom From and Freedom To is an exploration and celebration of artistic circumstance. Movement and sound improvisors from all around Chicago gather in front of a live audience, where they are grouped by chance. Each group performs an improvised set. Freedom From and Freedom To fuses diverse artistic backgrounds and practices to create unique and fleeting worlds.
TICKETS $15
ABOUT FREEDOM FROM AND FREEDOM TO
Dancers and musicians from diverse artistic backgrounds enter the space.
Their names go into a hat.
An audience member draws a group of names.
The chosen artists bring us into an improvised interdisciplinary world.
Freedom From and Freedom To events are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound. We use an ensemble of movers and sound-makers that are remarkably diverse in their crafts and backgrounds. Freedom From and Freedom To integrates relationality by engaging audience participation. The audience is invited to randomly draw a combination of artists who will perform together. Some of the participants have never engaged with each other before, which creates a challenging and often rewarding opportunity for world-making.
Freedom From and Freedom To is founded and curated by Cristal Sabbagh. Elastic Arts, home to Freedom From and Freedom To, is a 501c(3) non-profit organization fostering artistic exploration from a versatile Chicago venue by programming and presenting multifaceted performance and exhibition.
Elastic Arts fosters a community of music, art and performance in the Avondale/Logan Square neighborhoods of Chicago and beyond through developing, hosting, producing, and promoting creative, independent, and local music concerts, exhibitions, and multi-arts performances.
FEATURED ARTISTS
L to R, top row: Mya, Yatkin, Lee, Clemons, and Odim. Bottom row: Juice, Sabbagh, Christina, and Whitehead.
DANCERS
-
Mya (she/her) is a Chicago-based performer and improviser. She’s a resident artist at Films That Move (VA), a company member with Abby Z and the New Utility (OH) and House of DOV (IL), and she serves as the curator for Jello Performance Series.
IG: @mmmolassses
-
Nejla Yatkin (she/her) is an internationally recognized choreographer and dancer, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award, the National Dance Project Award, and the National Performance Network Creation Award. Her work explores memory, identity, and transformation through powerful, multidisciplinary performances. Learn more at www.ny2dance.com.
IG: @nejlayatkin21
-
Helen Lee (they/she) is a Queer Chicago-born interdisciplinary artist raised by immigrant parents from South Korea. They received an MFA with a focus in Performance and Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Dance with a minor in Theatre from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They have presented works internationally and was selected as a Newcity Breakout Artist in 2022, was a 2024 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist and a 2025 finalist for Fellowships to Artists Program.
IG: @momentumsensorium
-
Chicago native Ed Clemons is a movement artist and DJ, inspired by the energy and freestyle movements of hip hop and house music dance culture. He has had the opportunity to work with a number of talented Chicago artists; Marvin Tate's "A Great Day" (2017) and his adaptation of Langston Hughes' poem "Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz", with support from the Jazz Institute of Chicago; Dancemakers Forum (2018) with BraveSoul Movement, led by Daniel “Bravemonk” Haywood and Kelsa “K-Soul” Robinson, for their production entitled "Bitter-Sugar & Soul", performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Freedom From Freedom To (2019 - present) improv series created and organized by Cristal Sabbagh in collaboration with the Elastic Arts Foundation.
IG: @edo_spinz
-
Maya (she/they)’s practice is rooted between writing and dance, anchoring an artistic approach to dealing with how words move and what bodies they are a part of. Maya received honorable mention in the 2024 Ruth Weiss Foundation Poetry Competition, held a Ragdale Residency working in the Sybil Shearer Dance Studio in 2023 and has self published poetry and been published in places including The Performance Response Journal and the Chicago DanceMakers Forum Blog. Maya is a reader for the 2025 Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards, a Poet in Residence with the Chicago Poetry Center and a lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
IG: @maya.odim
-
Orlando “juice” De Leon Jr (he/they) is a Chicago dance and movement based artist, specializing in improvisation and street styles such as tutting, liquid, popping, and social dance.
He is trained in styles such as modern, ballet, West African diasporic styles- along with professional experience as a choreographer, event organizer, and visual media artist.
As a part of Chicago’s ever-growing street dance and battle scene- he researched and freelanced movement based work leading to the co-founding of [un]common grounds, an artist networking and movement organization in summer of 2021 along side colleague Kierah King- in efforts to build bridges in the connections of the artists of the city between stylistics.
-
Cristal Sabbagh’s interdisciplinary practice includes traditional portraiture, ceramics, and performance. Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. She embodies in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental. She also challenges power structures and awakens viewers’ senses. Cristal is the creator and curator of Freedom From and Freedom To events that are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound. In 2021 Cristal was awarded a 3Arts / Make a Wave Artist grant, and in 2023 she was awarded an Individual Artists Program grant from DCASE. In January of 2025 Cristal was included in New City’s Top 50 Players issue: People Who Really Perform in Chicago, in their Dance category.
She is currently curating and performing in Freedom From and Freedom To as an opportunity to combine most of her creative interests in a risk-taking and vulnerable way. It uses an ensemble of dancers and improvising musicians that are remarkably diverse in their approaches to dance, instrumentation, and backgrounds.
She is a core member of Marie Casimir’s Djasporas dance collective, seen at the Instigation Festivals in Chicago & New Orleans since 2016 and a member of Move Move Collaborative, in Baltimore, Maryland, since 2017. -
Born in Ruston, Louisiana and raised across Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas, Aaliyah Christina creates and supports performance work as an administrator, curator, movement artist, and writer. She makes dances and writes poetic stories about relationship/power dynamics, mental health, and Blackness as a resident on the Southside of Chicago. She co-organizes with Performance Response Journal (PRJ) and collaborates with community organizations and fellow artists across the city of Chicago. In 2021, Aaliyah received the 3Arts Make-A-Wave grant. Then in 2024, she was selected as a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist and the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency cohort. She has volunteered with Southside organizations like Assata’s Daughters and Southside Together in order to provide mutual aid and basic needs to her neighbors, canvass and petition for changes to political policy, and commune with neighbors and comrades to dismantle oppressive systems and befriend like-minded folks. She created PRAISE MOTHER SQUAD to highlight the multifaceted possibilities of Black majorette dance (aka j-sette) and platform stories about mental health, reproductive rights, and queer/chosen family dynamics.
-
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, among others. They make art and write about race, gender, and moving bodies; and support coalition movements committed to repair and transformation.
MUSICIANS
L to R, top row: Rubin (photo by Ricardo Adame), Mosley, Najee-Zaid, and Moore (photo by Adame). Bottom row: Morrison, Smith, Thomas, and Brown.
-
Scott Rubin (he/him) is Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensing data, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.
IG: @scottrubinmusic
-
Luc Mosley (he/him) specializes in woodwinds and electronics. His style draws inspiration from jazz, classical, ambient, and electronic dance music. Utilizing a blend of woodwinds and electronics, he draws upon sounds of the past to forge new pathways for music of the future.
IG: @fallingflowerarts
-
Najee-Zaid Searcy (any pronouns with respect) is a Chicago born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance and identity. Najee-Zaid uses their background in music, facilitation, and informal arts learning to explore the intersection of space and identity within the context of healing modalities. Find them at najeezaidsearcy.com.
IG: @najeesearcy
-
Allen Moore (he/him) is a Black Interdisciplinary Artist, Experimental Turntableist, Educator and Youth Mentor born and raised in the Historic Village of Robbins IL. Moore holds a Bachelors of Arts from Chicago State University, a Masters in Arts from Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University in 2016. His recent body work investigates both the audio and visual element of black death and black grief. His conceptual premise is to analyze the signifiers of Blackness through performative Improvisation and experimentation. Moore is driven to nurture and expand the agency of the Black Imagination. Moore has exhibited and performed across the greater midwest, including exhibitions at Tritriangle, Heaven Gallery, Compound Yellow, Experimental Sound Studio, Elastic Arts, Threewalls, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roots & Culture Gallery, Lula Cafe, The Star Media Group, Union Street Gallery, The Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, etc.
-
Jessica F. Morrison, lovingly known as MzBillionaire Success, is a Chicago-based theatre artist and digital visionary passionate about crafting transformative experiences both on stage and online. Her theatrical foundation was built on the South Side of Chicago, leading her to graduate with distinction from Carleton College with a BA in Theater Arts. She further honed her craft at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center—including study abroad in England—and later earned her MFA in Acting with distinction from DePaul University.
A dynamic force in devised theatre, Morrison has directed and developed original works, including her acclaimed contributions to Roosevelt University's freshman theatre program and her distinguished work on for colored girls at Carleton. As a playwright, director, actor, and composer, her voice is rich, compelling, and unmistakably her own. She has recently performed with Definition Theatre and Black Ensemble Theater, continuing her dedication to impactful, high-level stage work across Chicago.
Beyond the stage, Morrison is a trailblazer in the digital landscape. As MzBillionaire Success, she empowers multidisciplinary artists through free masterclasses on AI, marketing, and digital strategy—helping creatives thrive in a fast-changing world. Her fully immersive education course, Virtual Stage Mastery, seamlessly integrates her passion, knowledge, calling, and experience—bridging the gap between performance and digital visibility. Her mission is to cultivate a vibrant, worldwide community of artists who show up boldly—in every space they enter.
Her late mentor, GW Mercier, affirms: “She is an exceptional theatre person… bright, curious, organized, and creative… an asset to any [community].”
-
Arif Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker. His sonic work centers on diasporic citizenship and African-rooted performance practices, exploring hemispheric Blackness, marronage, and intertextuality. Smith was a 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence at University of Chicago's Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Currently, he is a manager at Old Town School of Folk Music and Research Associate at the Field Museum. Smith is also a member of Black Monument Ensemble.
-
Jefferey Allen Thomas (b.1979; Houston, TX) is a Chicago based Composer, Guitarist, Arranger/Orchestrator, and Music Director, whose music ranges from electric ensembles, solo pieces, to full scale orchestras. He is a founding member of Chicago’s freak marching band Mucca Pazza (2004 - 2014), the creator/music director of the Hideout’s annual MakeOut Party: An Evening of Aural Intercourse! (2006 - Current), co-creator with singer/songwriter Chris Salveter of the multi-media art group The Fruit Stare, (2014 - Current), and a frequent performer on the improvised dance/music series Freedom From and Freedom To. He has worked with the late Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton, legendary punk singer Excene Cervenka, Greek composer Michael Karras, guzheng virtuoso YuYen Xu, poet Marvin Tate, and art rocker Bobby Conn. His current ensembles are the doo wop group The Relevant Hairstyles and instrumental quartet The OFNG’s. He has music directed productions for Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Newberry Library, Redmoon Theater, Cabinet of Curiosities, the Neo-Futurists, and Theater Oobleck. He has performed at such major festivals as Lollapalooza, Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors, Festival International de Louisiane, True/False Film Festival, and the Montreal Jazz Festival. His first symphony “Rumour” premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (February 2014). His latest symphony “Taciturn” was completed during the COVID lockdown and will be premiered and released in late 2025. He also makes bamboo flutes, asphalt and acrylic abstract paintings, and is an active U.S. Masters swimmer.
-
Vocalist, pianist and composer Paige Brown (she/her) believes in the use of voice as a channel, and the use of the instrument/body as a voice. Having inherited a version of the deep, resonant vocals of her father and her late grandfather, she rejoices in the ability to play inside that resonance, bringing this sound to bear in songs that speak of joy, love, grief, and hope. She draws from a broad spectrum of influences that range from high school madrigal singers to college gospel choir, Debussy to Dr. Watts, Porgy and Bess to Patrice Rushen, skipping from soul to funk to folk and weaving through sounds somewhere in between. Although a lover of the forms she has trained in, she believes her greatest artistic growth currently lies in experimentation with the interdisciplinary improvisational community, learning from and alongside those who confound categorization and genre.
IG: @tpaige22u