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.
March 7, 2023 at 8PM at Elastic Arts: DUO COLLISION
Strum or Strut: Reflex (dance) + Katinka Kleijn (cello)
Computers Making Bad Decisions: Joshua Rubin (clarinets & electronics) + Katinka Kleijn (cellos & electronics)
Hiking with Lipstick: Lia Kohl + Katinka Kleijn (cellos & electronics)
Strum or Strut
Reflex and Kleijn met in NOLA performing Mars Williams' Devils Whistle. Strum or Strut freely explores a concept of two people mutually influencing each other through welcome interruptions and taking turns.
Computers making bad decisions
Los Angeles-based clarinetist Joshua Rubin and cellist Katinka Kleijn create a collaborative work for instruments and electronics. Shared circuits between synthesizers and the human body, neural networks, lost drones, ghost ensembles, and computers making bad decisions--these are some of the featured themes in their new duo collaboration.
Hiking with Lipstick
Katinka Kleijn and Lia Kohl’s shared practice explores vulnerability and resilience through the cello as an object, a body, and a sound-making tool. The largest iteration of this practice to date is a performance involving 30 broken cellos and a public pool (Eckhart Park Pool, March 2019), presented by the City of Chicago’s Nights out in the Park. The piece, Water on the Bridge, is a slow moving, process-based work in which they clean, play, float, and submerge cellos in a pool, accompanied by live electronics (see Chicago Magazine, Strad Magazine, Chicago Reader, SCAPI Magazine). Additionally, Kohl & Kleijn have presented work at the New Orleans/Chicago based Instigation Festival, Catalytic Sound Festival, Yucca Valley Material Lab in Joshua Tree, and the Chicago Cultural Center.
Artist Bios
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.
Kolin Aka Reflex is an artist from Chicago. He practices different forms of street style dancing including animation, hiphop, and krump. Reflex has over 7 years of competitive and performance experience in several settings.
Clarinetist Joshua Nathan Rubin has been praised by the New York Times as, "incapable of playing an inexpressive note." He has collaborated with many of the foremost composers and performers of our time, and this season is featured in performances in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Houston, Geneva, Bergen, and Berlin. He works with technologies to make electronic music easier for performers and composers, and to build platforms to assist ensembles and other arts organizations that value transparency and collective management. Joshua maintains his artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.
Lia Kohl is a cellist, composer, and sound artist based in Chicago. Her wide-ranging practice includes solo composition and performance, installation, improvisation, and collaboration. She tours nationally and internationally, working in theater, jazz, rock, and experimental contexts. Her work centers curiosity and patience, an exploration of the mundane and profound possibilities of sound.
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.