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War of the words
A new reading series packs a punch.
Bill Hillmann has competition in his blood. So when the 2002 Golden Gloves boxing champ turned to his other love, storytelling, he couldn’t help but blend the two passions.
He kicked off the Windy City Story Slam in February, and it’s been steadily gathering steam ever since. To demonstrate the freewheeling essence of the slam, Hillmann opened the fourth installment in April with an improvised first draft of a story about running with the bulls in Pamplona to combat his own suicidal depression. “Life’s funny, life’s dramatic, life’s chaotic,” he says.
So is the event. On the last Tuesday of every month, Hillmann and his crew, including his mentor Don De Grazia, and coproducers Stephen Wozniak and Kate Paris, invite a cross section of writers, playwrights, comedians, neighbors, parolees and tamale vendors to the Quennect 4 Gallery in Humboldt Park. The space—with a makeshift stage that might be art itself—is of a piece with the gritty truths that are espoused at the Story Slam. Hillmann wants to continue the oral storytelling tradition in Chicago by bringing together artists and storytellers of various disciplines and backgrounds, and admits that his dream is to have legendary oral historian Studs Terkel onstage.
Terkel has been an obvious influence on Hillmann, but the inspiration for the Windy City Story Slam came from legendary poetry-slam founder Marc Smith, who was the featured guest in April.
Each show begins the same way: Hillmann and his crew feature one guest whom they consider vital to the Chicago storytelling community to kick off the show promptly at 8pm. In addition to Smith, past guests have included WNEP Theater founding director and self-described “angry white guy” Don Hall, iconic artist Fred Burkhart and enigmatic doll-maker Jo-Jo Baby.
After the featured guest, Jai Henry of the Minneapolis Henrys provides a musical break, performing four or five story-songs on his guitar. Then comes the celebrated competition, wherein five invited slammers take over the stage and perform or improvise a story in under five minutes. “It’s mixed martial arts,” De Grazia says of the competition. “It’s whatever you want to bring to it.”
Everyone has a story to tell, but it’s the audience’s job to determine which ones are worthwhile. The crowd can “blah blah blah” a storyteller off the stage, and other audience members can argue for “more more more.” Hillmann keeps a whistle at hand to regain order and clear the stage. After the stories, all five performers come back on stage for the audience to applaud-select the winner.
Of course slammers invite their friends, but Hillmann and his crew are mindful of bringing disparate cliques together to make the most dynamic performances possible. The audience responds honestly, it seems, to crown the best story of the night, regardless of allegiances. In fact, friends of the slammers are usually the ones doing the heckling.
May’s slam—the fifth—was a dead heat between two storytellers. Jose “The Door Guy” Rivera eked out the win with a story about a racially heated fight during his recent stint in Cook County Jail (which incidentally had prevented him from participating in the April slam).
Writer Max Glaessner took home the April prize with a story of a fifth-grade crush gone awry, a bizarre twist considering the preceding story was about fifth-grade love as well. Glaessner politely dismissed this coincidence to the crowd: “Heckle all you fucking want.”
His delivery, and prep-school charm, was the difference. “You can’t just read; you have to be very conscious of that performance element and having that dialogue with the crowd,” Glaessner says.
That’s the essence of the Windy City Story Slam: You never know what you’re going to see or hear, from the performer or the crowd.
The next rumble brews Tuesday 24.
