LIVE. LOVE. NOW. A new solo show by Sandra Delgado

• • 3ARTS MATCH
  • 147% contributed

STRETCH GOAL! Thank you to every LIVE.LOVE.NOW supporter so far! We’ve reached the first goal! With the time remaining, I’m excited to announce a new goal of $10,000. These additional funds will support travel to an end-of-life conference next year, support a series of "Death Over Dinner" gatherings and hire a much needed assistant. To jump start this new goal, a generous donor has stepped up and will match the next $1000 in donations.

LIVE. LOVE. NOW. is a nourishing and immersive solo show rooted in death and life, grief and joy, and living in the present. This intimate multimedia experience will take audiences on a journey of stories and communal rituals, soulful music, and fantastical projections. This healing show will leave you walking out feeling better than when you walked in.

About This Project

I had always feared death. 

And then my grandmother died. 

She was making rice, a ritual she had performed thousands of times in her life. I saw her moments after she passed, peacefully laying on the linoleum kitchen floor, raw grains of rice scattered around her. She had always told me that she didn’t fear death and by the expression of her face, I knew it to be true. That image of her stayed with me for years and became the inspiration for the very first piece of theater I ever created, para mis madres, a music-filled meditation on what happens to you in your final breath. 

Fast forward twenty years, and within the first year of the pandemic, I lost three of my elders and just as many friends. The fear of death, my loved one’s death, and my own mortality started haunting me. I didn’t know what else to do but take my grief and choke it down, convincing myself I was ok until I found myself alone in the desert, months and months later, screaming out their names to the night sky. I’ve shared the story of that cathartic night in the desert in my music project, The Sandra Delgado Experience (also brought to life by a 3Arts 3AP campaign), and my telling culminates in a communal act where the audience is invited to share the name(s) of people that have made their transition. It feels risky to go there with an audience who is there to hear music, but afterwards, it’s what everyone wants to talk about. “The thing I needed that I didn’t know I needed.” It illuminated for me how ill-equipped we are as a culture to talk about loss and grief and how desperately we want to and need to. 

LIVE. LOVE. NOW. asks us to recognize that death is a natural and inevitable part of our lives and to find freedom, wonder and peace in that reality. This show aims to normalize conversations around end of life, death and grieving and provides audiences with concrete tools for navigating this process that they can carry with them and share with loved ones. Communal rituals, informed by global death and grieving practices, ancestral veneration, and living in the now, will encourage people to get to know and trust each other, get vulnerable, share truths and celebrate being alive. A sonic landscape will meld the modern with the ancient with echoes of Latin-American folk music. Interactive projections that I (and potentially the audience) can physically play with will explore the micro and the macro, from the warmth of the womb to the expansiveness of the cosmos. 3AP funding will support a period of intense study, research and interviews, including my training as a death doula and the resources and time to conduct first-person interviews with death-adjacent workers, such as oncology nurses and hospice workers, as well as people who want to share their grief story and how grief taught them about living. The show will premiere at Collaboraction, my long-time artistic home, in our new space in Humboldt Park.

In these turbulent times, experiences that connect us to each other and connect us to ourselves are essential. Through LIVE. LOVE. NOW. I want audiences to discover their own pathways to joy and peace in the midst of the difficult, and to celebrate our lives, here and now. 

Thank yous

Contribute any amount or choose from the levels below.

• $25
  Shout out on social media ($25.00 is tax deductible.)
• $50
  Above, plus handwritten love note from Sandra ($50.00 is tax deductible.)
• $100
  Above, plus a specially curated music playlist inspired by LIVE.LOVE.NOW ($100.00 is tax deductible.)
• $250
  Above, plus an invitation to a work-in-progress rehearsal ($250.00 is tax deductible.)
• $500
  Above plus 2 tickets to the premiere of LIVE.LOVE.NOW. ($300.00 is tax deductible.)
• $1000
  Above, plus coffee and conversation with me! ($900.00 is tax deductible.)

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Sandra Delgado

Community Awardee

Sandra Delgado is a Colombian-Chicagoan writer, performer and producer who creates joyful spaces of connection for all. Hailed as “her own brand of triple threat” (New City Chicago), she writes plays inspired by underknown Chicago histories centering Latine lives. She …

View Sandra Delgado's profile

• 2 updates
• 52 supporters

• Update 1: We got the 3Arts match!

  Posted on November 07, 2024

   

  Wow! Dear friends and family, thank you thank you thank you for being the earliest supporters of LIVE.LOVE.NOW. The response to this project has been incredible. My inbox is filled with folks connecting me to end of life workers as well as offers to share personal death/grief/love stories. Those messages and your support keep illuminating how meaningful and necessary this project is. I've reached my first $2000 goal and now 3Arts has kicked in additional $2000! Less than $2000 left to go to guarantee the funding.  You made this possible and I am so grateful.

  Update 2: We did it! We hit $6000! It's stretch goal time!

  Posted on November 15, 2024

   

  Dearest Friends of Family,

  We did it! Thanks to you, LIVE.LOVE.NOW. has hit it's original goal of $6000. My heart is overflowing with gratitude. We have two weeks left in the campaign, which means I am now going towards a stretch goal of $10,000. These additional funds will support travel to an end-of-life conference next year, support a series of "Death Over Dinner" gatherings and hire a much needed assistant. To jump start my stretch goal, a generous donor has stepped up and will match the next $1000 in donations. So if you know anyone who might be interested in supporting this work, please send them the campaign.

  Have a beautiful weekend.

  Love you.

• Thank you to the following for contributing to 3Arts with the recommendation that we support this project.

  • Mia Beckman

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 Additional support provided by: