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 14, 2023 at 8PM at Elastic Arts: SYNTHSATION
Synthsation is a devised interdisciplinary performance by Rin Peisert and Katinka Kleijn. A first-time collaboration, both share interests in outrageous fusions, meaningful concepts, facilitating chance, as well as synthesizing bodies and materials into new (in)coherent units. This will be preceded by an opening set of Steph Patsula.
Artist Bios
The projects Steph Patsula creates are focused across a variety of time-centric processes coalescing in a union of instrument construction, experimental sound creation, and world-building. Patsula’s work prioritizes the creation of immersive art installations and live-performance which explores bodies as beacons and receptors in relationship to each other. This practice embraces the unpredictable dynamics of working with new materials, spaces and bodies by corresponding with them improvisationally. A technique that reflects a personal desire for reciprocity and intimacy through an attentiveness to collaboration and adaptability.
Rin Peisert is an interdisciplinary artist who works with bodies, sounds, found objects, and live actions to explore conditions for interdependence and sincerity. Her site-responsive actions use intervention and interaction as tools to reorganize behavior and to exaggerate the quotidian. Peisert’s performance work has been seen at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art Shanghai, The Momentary Museum, and Defibrillator Art Gallery, and as well as street corners, rooftops, a bank vault, a bomb shelter, and a market for arranged marriages. Peisert has an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts, NYC. She also co-produces and conducts the graphic score series, Image of Thought and is the Performing Arts Curatorial Artist in Residence at Elastic Arts, organizing the quarterly series, Relative Intensity Noise.
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.