On the first three Tuesdays of March, Homeroom Residency presents world-renowned cellist, improviser, and performer, Katinka Kleijn.
Each week, the artist will present different elements of their practice through collaboration and thoughtful curation.
Katinka Kleijn
March 21, 2023 at 8 PM at Elastic Arts: ODE TO CHI–NEW WORKS '22-'23
Works to include:
New Work for Cello & Electronics by Nicole Mitchell **World Premiere**
Screening of RESIDUUM, an experimental short film created by composer-performer/video artist Aliya Ultan for Katinka Kleijn
The Body as a Variable Resistor, by Katinka Kleijn, for cellist and cello synth
“The people in Chicago create spaces, figuratively and literally. They envision, dare, struggle, persevere, create community and share artistic wealth. It feels like you can unfold at a variable tempo, and Chicago is still there when you take off. A rich environment is perfect for chance music, and I feel lucky I got dropped into the mix. The projects presented tonight are all linked to this emergent environment.”
New Work for Cello & Electronics by Nicole Mitchell **World Premiere**
Chicago’s own Nicole Mitchell presents a new work for Cello & Electronics in a world premiere.
RESIDUUM is an experimental short film created by composer-performer/video artist, Aliya Ultan for cellist/improviser, Katinka Kleijn. The piece presents environments of epic proportions, asking a cellist to confront exceedingly large amounts of trash in real-time. The encounter depicts a reality not far from our own in a fascinatingly bizarre audiovisual fusion of mortal and immortal matter. RESIDUUM at a first glance is a call for action as trash raises issues of life, class, space, and sustainability. Yet, RESIDUUM co-constructs a narrative with its viewer that can extend far beyond the socio-political, tugging at the heartstrings of a truly interpersonal issue of our present and future. RESIDUUM Teaser
Katinka Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor is an ever-evolving project featuring an environment where a cello, a synthesizer and a human body share a 9V circuit.
Artist Bios
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s. She started with Maia and Shanta Nurullah in Samana (the AACM's first all-woman ensemble) and as a member of the David Boykin EXPANSE. Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections and Ice Crystal, and she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. The former first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Mitchell celebrates endless possibility by “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.” Some of her newest work with Black Earth Ensemble explores intercultural collaborations; Bamako*Chicago, featuring Malian kora master, Ballake Sissoko and Mandorla Awakening with Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Tatsu Aoki (taiko, bass, shamisen). As a composer, Mitchell has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Stone, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America (New Works), the Chicago Jazz Festival, ICE, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Mitchell has performed with creative music luminaries including Craig Taborn, Roscoe Mitchell, Joelle Leandre, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, George Lewis, Mark Dresser, Steve Coleman, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Bill Dixon, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Wilkerson, Rob Mazurek, and Billy Childs, and Hamid Drake. She is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011), the Chicago 3Arts Award (2011) , the Doris Duke Artist Award (2012) and the United States Artist Award (2020). Mitchell is a Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, and previously taught at University of California Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh.
Aliya Ultan (b. 1996) is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, composer, improviser, and filmmaker. Emerging from homelessness, Aliya’s creative means for survival have taken many forms. Classically trained as a cellist, composer, and improviser, Aliya has worked with the New York Philharmonic, Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, and Douglas Ewart among others. Alongside Aliya’s endeavors as a composer-performer, she has worked as Program Director for Make Music Cleveland providing hundreds of instruments to displaced families across Ohio as well as free concerts in venues that are otherwise financially inaccessible. Aliya is currently based in NYC regularly organizing site-specific shows featuring improvisers, songwriters, bands, movers, and visual artists. www.aliyaultan.com RESIDUUM Teaser
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, performance art, and collaboration. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts (Water on the Bridge, RESIDUUM, The Body as a Variable Resistor). Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”
Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, as in her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), presented at Big Ears Festival by Ensemble Dal Niente. More recently, her silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) and her performance Conducted Vault, for Cellist, Synth and Vault (2022) explore touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.
Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. She released STIR with Bill MacKay on Drag City Records, Momentum 5—Stammer (Tryptich) with Ken Vandermark and Sine Nomine with Mark Feldman. A member of Ken Vandermark’s Edition 55, she has enjoyed improvising with musicians like Joe McPhee, Lia Kohl, Caroline Davis, Ed Wilkerson, Damon Locks, Mars Williams, and Du Yun.
Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
About Homeroom Residency
Homeroom Residency is a new initiative to provide reliable, paid performance work to Chicago artists. The residency gives artists space to develop existing collaborations and explore new ideas. Residency is directly supported by individual donors.