Theatre Y and Homeroom present:
Angelo Hart - piano
Kioto Aoki - silent film projections
Doors Open at 6 PM
Showtime 7-10 PM
Theatre Y
3611 W. Cermak
Admission: Free
This is a BYOB event
This performance is hosted by Poet/Vocalist Marvin Tate, as part of his series ‘Soul Salad', a musical offering of national and local acts, from free-jazz, blues, and classical to merengue, and performance art, occurring at Theatre Y on the last Friday of each month. Tate’s vision is to cross-pollinate the arts and make his old neighborhood a hotspot for locals and out-of-towners.
Angelo Hart has always had an unique and expressive approach to his instrument. Angelo has spent personal time studying jazz and classical legends such as Thelonius Monk, Art Tatum, Cecil Taylor, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea, Debussy, Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven and many more. Time spent with the great educators and musicians in Chicago, along with his natural innovative musicianship has molded him into the great musician that he is today. He approaches the piano with command and finesse, displaying a unique relationship and connection between the two of them.
Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose studio practice navigates propositions of spatial and visual acuity through the explorations of the body in space. Primarily an analogue photographer and filmmaker, vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema operate as tangential frameworks of analogue processes and negotiations of time, frame, sequence and motion within the mundane. Her works balance the act of revealing and withholding along axes of sight and relativity, while body serves as an inflection point oscillating between assertions of personal, communal, cultural narratives.
Her research-based methodology also integrates material, geographic and spatial histories into the conceptual and applied processes. Installations are arranged to emphasize and accentuate the relationship between the work, viewer and exhibition environment, often playing with the activation of two-dimensional images in a three-dimensional space.
Aoki is also the 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto house, an okiya (geisha house) performing arts family from Tokyo with roots dating back to the Edo period. Standing on the professional stage from the age of 7, and studying under father Tatsu Aoki (Toyoaki Sanjuro), she continues the family legacy as musician on taiko and tsuzumi; and under her stage name Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) when on shamisen. Working within traditional and experimental contexts Aoki sustains this musical lineage traversing geographical and cultural boundaries.
Aoki's playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to reorient the notion of percussion as mere rhythm. Her stoic, durational explorations elicit soundscapes that project organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki balances the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility, bringing taiko to contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance and extending her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation.
Aoki’s work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and private collections. Musical projects include solo and collaborative albums released by Asian Improv Records and FPE Records, Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING, Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and the Soundtrack series at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Chicago Cultural Center, 6018|North (Chicago), Gallery Kobo Chika (Tokyo, Japan), The Lab (San Francisco), and the Barbican Centre (London); among others. Aoki leads Tsukasa Taiko, a program of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW); and is also program curator at AIRMW.