Comfort Music + online edition
in conjunction with Comfort Station, presented by Experimental Sound Studio's Quarantine Concerts
7:30pm Tuli Bera - movement, Adam Shead - percussion
8:00pm Marvin Tate - voice, Molly Jones - saxophone
8:30 Sara Zalek - movement, Cher Jey - vocals
9:00pm Low: Alexander Hayashi - movement, Takashi Shallow - electronics
9:30 Cristal Sabbagh - movement, Scott Rubin - viola
Thursday, April 9th on Twitch.tv $donate what you can
Homeroom is curating weekly Thursdays in April at Comfort Station (online), as part of our annual takeover of their Comfort Music Series. This year, we’re presenting an additional dimension — music acts combined w/ another performative medium, including video, dance, spoken word, and puppetry!
Artist Bios:
Tuli Bera is a Bengali-American dance artist based in Chicago. She co-runs the J e l l o Performance Series alongside fellow chicago artist, Sarah Stearn. Bera is a core dancer core dancer with Ishti. And she serves as Program Coordinator and Aerial Instructor at Aerial Dance Chicago. Adam Shead is among the newest generation of Chicago improvisers, bringing his unique approach to the drum set to such groups as Adam Shead’s “Finding Home”, Wark/Dawid/Heinemann/Shead, Ben Zucker’s “Fifth Season”, the Stein/Shead duo, and the Adiaphora Orchestra. Shead’s background in hardcore punk, contemporary classical, jazz, and improvised music provides him with the ability to move fluidily throughout a myriad of musical styles while utilizing extended techniques, blistering speed, and dynamic control in a manner often unheard on the drum set. Shead has performed at renowned music festivals such as The Present is Present in Amsterdam, NL, The Ann Arbor Edge Fest, Homebody Festival in South Bend, IN, and The Chicago Jazz Festival. Shead has performed alongside such luminaries as Jason Stein, Tim Daisy, Steve Swell, John Dikeman, Jasper Stadhouders, Mary Oliver, Anna Webber, Angel Bat Dawid, and Matt Piet. Shead is the founder and conductor of the twenty piece Adiaphora Orchestra and currently works as the Director of Outreach at Slate Arts and Performance in Chicago, IL.
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Marvin Tate is a multi-disciplinarian artist, from the city’s West-side. Influenced by the likes of: Amiri Baraka, Shel Silverstein, Funkidellic, Captain Beef Heart, Oscar Brown Jr., Roland Kirk, and Nina Simone; Tate effortlessly blends literary musings, social commentary and dark humor into his songs, art and storytelling.
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Molly Jones is an improviser, saxophonist, and electroacoustic composer based in Chicago.
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Sara Zalek (they/them/we/our/us), is a performing artist and facilitator, rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, hybrids, and our complicated relationship to knowing. Our work challenges the capitalist quest for the eternal elixir, and asserts the intentional act of disruption to create social and ecological change. We connect national and international teaching artists with Chicago art-makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas (including dance, Butoh, Physical Theater, Experimental Music). We foster positive communication and arts integration within Chicago’s complex, overlapping sectors. We create opportunities for workshops, performances, and conversations about the body, for the body.
www.butohchicago.com
www.saratonin.com
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Cher Jey is a Chicago based, multidisciplinary artist from Baltimore, MD. She investigates expression through sound, movement and line. Her research explores improvisational and vocal styling elements of storytelling through black classical music, world music (with emphasis on Afro Cuban Lucumi song and dance) and stream of consciousness writing. She performs as vocalist and dancer for Chicago innovators David Boykin's Sebau and Expanse projects and Marvin Tate's Kitchen Sink, as well as Baltimore based multi-instrumentalist /composer Jamal Moore's Mojuba Ensemble. She produced and performed Cher Jey & The Abbey Project presents: THE MESSAGE, a tribute to vocalist/composer/actress Abbey Lincoln. Cher Jey is vocalist, conceptualist and intuitive composer for LUA, with guitarist Alex Wing and Sekhmet RISING, a collaborative project with percussion and wind instrumentalists Jamal Moore, Nik Francis and Bashi Rose.
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Low is an inquiry of lowness in body, sound, light and affect. Alexander Hayashi & Takashi Shallow utilize improvisational movement and music to navigate the collision of form and identity. The floor is the space for this dialogue to play out, questioning how culture and ideology shape the value of being low.
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Cristal Sabbagh is a teaching interdisciplinary artist influenced by film, history, politics, Butoh and improvised sound. In her performances, her goal is to embody transformational memories, challenge power structures, and awaken viewers senses. Cristal's found that working with live improvised music has inspired her best work, which has become vital to her practice. She’s currently curating and performing in Freedom From and Freedom To, an improvisational, cross-medium performance piece. It’s 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's a core member of Marie Casimir’s Djasporas dance collective, seen at the Instigation Festivals in Chicago & New Orleans over the past four years. For the past three years, she's also been a member of Move Move Collaborative, in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Scott Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved interdisciplinary collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.