Hot Mess!

Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth.

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We are standing on the ancestral lands of the Myaamia  Očhéthi Šakówiŋ  Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi) Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk) Peoria and all First Nation People. We pay respects to their elders past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today. And please join us in uncovering such truths at any and all public events.

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Episode 10: October 28, 2023

Fabulous Freddie: Freddie’s dance journey is a self-exploration and healing practice in claiming himself whole through embodying his masculine and feminine energies as a Black Gay artist. By choosing to express himself through both Breaking and Vogue Femme movement foundations, he has opened a new space for an important conversation to happen through his body.

 

Mabel Kwan & Andrew Tham as MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY is a band birthed from the fictitious art scene known as big TEEN. big TEEN bands revel in aesthetics of distraction, multiplicity, and metatheatrics. MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY embrace this artistic framework with monolithic performances that incorporate synthesizers, MIDI sampling, multilingual declamations, choreography informed by Chinese calligraphy, and LED light worship. That is, MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY attempt to overwhelm the audience in the hopes of bringing them into a new kind of focus; a kind of transcendence through multiplicity and confusion. It's like witnessing a monumental event happen in two parallel universes simultaneously, or watching an episode of Laverne & Shirley in two languages.

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Iván Espinosa is a Latino choreographer and interdisciplinary scholar that writes about and creates work engaged with mycology, climate change, interspecies performance, and Japanese Butoh.  Iván is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at the University of Colorado. Iván has presented his ecology-themed artwork nationwide at venues such as La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York, Seattle International Butoh Festival and numerous academic conferences. Iván began his formative artistic training in Seattle with Pacific Northwest Butoh pioneer Joan Laage, who continues to serve as his foremost mentor and collaborator to this day. Since graduating from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Iván's artwork has been focused on studying the relationships between human bodies and mycelium fungi networks through the lenses of bioacoustics and site-specific performance.  His recent multimedia installations involving mushrooms and mycelium bioacoustics were highlighted in a special issue of the PERFORMANCE RESEARCH journal titled "On Dark Ecologies."

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Aurora Tabar is a performing artist, occupational therapist, and multi-tasking mom. Her professional and creative practices examine the process of healing and the potential for transformation. Most recently Aurora had the pleasure of collaborating with members of WATCHTOWER (Rosé Hernandez, Ginger Krebs, Bryan Saner, and Sara Zalek) during a residency at Roman Susan Gallery. Aurora has presented solo and collaborative performances across Chicago including at Elastic Arts Foundation, Prop Theater, Links Hall, and High Concept Laboratories. As a special educator, Aurora is committed to inclusion and helping students build functional skills that they can carry into the future. She lives on the west side of Chicago with her partner, two adorable kiddos, and a cohort of cats.

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Karyna Herrera: I was born in 1975 and come from Switzerland and Ecuador. I studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design and obtained a Master‘s degree in Art in Public Space. My acting studies complement my professional career. I have already participated in several exhibitions and am active in various performance events. I worked as a curator and co-organiser of performance events at the ((ort)) Emmenbrucke studio until December 2018. Since 2021, I have been a member of the B74 Raum für Kunst and organize unconventional exhibitions as a curator together with the B74 team. „Make-Art-Happening“, 2020 is my own project as a curator and exhibition organizer. Art and culture are life companions for me. As an artist I enjoy working in the fields of performance, photography, video and art research. Space and time are used consciously in my work. The starting point of my artistic work is usually personal observation and reflection on social and political events. At the same time, I am preoccupied with the question of the transience and continuity of things, nature and humanity. In doing so, I carefully observe and examine my surroundings and their traces of change. In this way I find ideas and motifs for works of art.

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Hereaclitus: In 87' they met and collaborated with Linda Montano. Inspiring 2 decades of ART/LIFE biodynamic art.

 

ASL interpretation performed by Olivia Ginn and supported in part by 3Arts Foundation.

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Episode 9: July 29, 2023

GoldGrrl (she/her) is a queer Afro-Panamanian singer and dancer who specializes in metal scream vocals and performs Old Way Vogue with the House of Alain Mikli. She has a background in jazz choir and participated in the Georgia District Honor Choir. GoldGrrl led volunteer vocal workshops for G!RLs Rock camp and received an Awesome Foundation award in 2018 to teach adults how to scream safely.

 

Vanessa Skantze transitioned from text-based performance to movement in 2001 when she co-created the sound/movement improvisation ensemble Death Posture with Donald Miller and Rob Cambre in New Orleans. Vanessa is a co-founder of Teatro de la Psychomachia, a DIY space which has hosted national and international performing artists and musicians since 2010.

 

Juliann Wang is an interdisciplinary artist, sound sculpture, and performer. Exploring spaces she has been, these inquiries question perceptions of time, space, and belonging through landscapes both real and imagined. Her creation embraces the intrinsic beauty of difference and unpredictable nature of things.

 

Jinlu Luo: My artwork is my soul, my emotions, my feelings, and my heart, displaying my experience of the world. My dramatization of thought is for my own purpose. I’m the audience of my own performance. What I can get a witness is not necessarily the performance product, which is to say the staging of ideas to audience eyes, but rather the dramatization of thought in the creative process itself. Here is a person-role.

 

Muso is a storyteller whose goal is to create immersive worlds that center characters birthed from different aspects of her human experience. She focuses mainly on womanhood, sex, power and culture, ultimately as part of an identity which seeks to deconstruct and challenge hegemonic principles. Muso released her first EP Ache: Demos in 2022.

 

D Jean-Baptiste: Whether through a budding experimental electro-acoustic group, a blossoming band called Fruitleather, solo audio work, or years of performance study both in and out of Chicago, D is learning to listen.

 

Anna is a multidisciplinary artist frequently engaging intersections of body, voice, objects and ritual to reveal social and technological structures that tie individuals to communities… most recent work explores feminist speculative world building, working between live performance and volumetric 3D/VR landscapes.. released several albums of music under the name Anna Oxygen, with a recent contribution to Kill Rock Stars 30th anniversary covers series.

 

Wannapa P-Eubanks is a Butoh dance performer, Improviser, Choreographer, Movement Coach, and emerging actor, who creates expressive dance/ movement inspired by personal memories. Her performances often stems from a personal experience or a specific memory that grows into a poetic image that she imbues with the memory.

 

Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois and is a first generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been an active musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms.

 

Episode 8: May 27, 2023

Hiroko Tamano. (Born in 1952 in Fukuoka prefecture, the second of three daughters in a farmer's family). In 1970, she moved to Tokyo to study art. In 1971, she visited Hijikata's studio and joined his company in 1972. She made her stage debut with " 燔儀大踏鑑 ( HanGi DaiTouKwan)" at Kyoto University’s West auditorium. She became Koichi Tamano’s partner and has been working with him ever since. In the late 70s, Koichi and Hiroko moved to the United States, settling in the Bay area. They were the first Japanese butoh settlers on the West Coast. Hiroko has been teaching & introducing butoh to generations of students in the US for 30 years now. She is still teaching, choreographing, and performing today.

 

Born 1981 in Ho, Ghana, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] is a transwoman who works internationally but lives in Kumasi, Ghana. sHit is a multidisciplinary “artivist”, curator, mentor, the founder and artistic director of crazinisT artisT studio and perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR) which aimed at promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and thinkers. As a performer and installation artist, crazinisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts, sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalized groups or individuals. With rituals and a gender-fluid persona, sHit employs sHits own body as a thought-provoking tool in performances, photography, video, and installations, ‘life-and-live-art’ confronting issues such as disenfranchisement, social justice, violence, objectification, internalized oppression, anti blackness, systemic indoctrination and many more. crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe including countries such as Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, Cape Verde, USA, Spain, Brazil, France and UK. sHit has also been featured in several, publications and magazines such as the I-D Vice London, I-D Vice Dutch, Financial times, King Kong Magazine, CCQ London, Maimi Rails, ‘Freeflowingvisuals’, TRT WORD Film Documentary, This is Africa, Art Ghana, Lost At E Minor, CNN, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), Horizonte da Cena, Radio FRO etc

 

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 series, Relative Intensity Noise.

 

Mallory Yanhan Qiu (b. Chongqing, China) is a Chicago-based artist and curator who is deeply passionate about live sound performance, sonic studies, body movement, poetry, and digital visuals. Mallory draws inspiration from physical sensations and biological movements, aiming to flip the familiar and discover memory-laden places that coexist both near and far. She has performed at Compound Yellow, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Elastic Arts, Mana Contemporary, {} () {} ∆ ‡ | () {} Nonation Art Lab, Research House for Asian Art, SAIC, and Tritriangle. 

 

Mz. Mr. has been a burlesque performer for more than a decade and has trained professionals in the Chicago area and around the world. But many days find her teaching at the Chicago Therapy Collective, a mental health and advocacy organization for trans people. There, she plans events like a variety show for trans performers at Andersonville’s Midsommarfest 2022 in Andersonville. Mz. Mr. holds a masters degree in art therapy from the School of the Art Institute.

 

Proud to be integral to the exhibition in Lucerne, Switzerland, «Video Hybrid» May 12 through June 2.B74 Raum für Kunst is a non-profit contemporary art space located a fifteen-minute walk from Lucerne train station. The space is managed by ten artists, who also practice their work in the field of curating and exhibiting. The different backgrounds, networks and years of the member team enable a diverse program without media preferences: from young, experimental exhibition formats to more established positions and a wide range of events with discursive questions about art and society, readings, concerts and performances. In the foreground is the effort to show artistic works that are characterized by high quality and substance. The active members work on their projects with great personal commitment and thus create a program that carries on the idea of ​​an independent art space.

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Episode 7: November 12, 2022

HOT MESS // MOVE MOVE TAkEOVER

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Move Move Collaborative is a Baltimore based movement initiative. It began in 2017, as a container to explore horizontal organization in ensemble performance. Seeking to bring the macrocosm of our embodied histories into the microcosm of group dynamics, we make time to listen to all the voices in the space and create work we are all excited to perform. Over time, Move Move Collaborative has adapted to center care and become an intentional space of exploration across difference. Move Move hosts an annual gathering where people come together to share body based practices and modes of thinking with the body, all while keeping our sense organs facing performance.

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Members of Move Move Collaborative:
Cristal Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens the viewer's senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures. Her son, Julius Sabbagh joins her making his own music composed using app technology.

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Peter Redgrave is an interdisciplinary performing artist and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. In his solo work, he explores vulnerability and the direct energetic exchange between performer and audience. In collaborative work he values the complex and deep connection of consensus. He cut his performing teeth in 1990’s Chicago in performative bands like Mother Country Death Rattle, 2X4, and Smelling Salt Amusements. Since 2010 he has trained with dancers, opening and accessing joints, unlocking images held in the fibres of the body. He works in improvisation and score based movement work. Redgrave often uses open adaptable structures to build performances which can be shaped by the spaces where they are presented. He has performed at Under the Counter Culture in Cardiff, Wales, the High Zero Festival, AKIMBO, a festival for site specific dance, Transmodern Festival, and the Philadephia Freeform Festival in 2016. He has performed across North America and Europe.

 

Orlando Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, herbalist and activist. He is the steward of Gray's Manor Farm, a permaculture center in Calvert County, MD that has been African-American owned since 1830. Orlando has performed with Chris Taylor, Baba L'Salaam, Isa Leal, Peter Redgrave, and Jeron White. He has curated art exhibitions and performances including a benefit for Standing Rock. He has performed in High Zero Festival, Fields Fest 2016, and with the Move Move Collaborative. All of Orlando's work is an expression of protest for the discontent around how we conduct ourselves as a society. He seeks to tend the conditions that we need as organisms in a robust, vital, and healthy ecosystem. 

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Ashley Shey is a body linguist. She is a first generation Cameroonian American artist born in Washington, DC who carries on her cultural traditions of dance and storytelling as a means for remembrance and self-knowledge. Through improvisational dance and experimental performance, she engages the potential for alchemical transformation in each moment through use of meditative movement.

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Emmett Wilson is also called ‘Ew! The Dancer’ amongst other names that are connected to stories they tell with their body. They grew up dancing in the Houston Met Dance studio, earned a BFA at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where they stayed and made many body-based performances while working as the community garden coordinator of The City Library; they’re now planted in Philadelphia where they were a fellow at the Headlong Performance Institute in the spring of 2021. They often venture down to Baltimore to be with their cousin and her son (who’s a dog named Lhasa), and to play with friends and artists in MoveMove. Emmett graduated from the Crestone Healing Arts Center in May of 2022- their practice is called Dear Body. All of Emmett’s work hinges upon improvisationally harnessing the power of embarrassment and stewarding ecosystems in biological as well as psycho-spiritual ways. 

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Matthew Williams is a Baltimore-based nonbinary interdiscilinary artist and educator working in dance/performance. Their performance practice is inspired by the human body as a site for choice, liberation, and a means to be in relationship with place and community.  Matthew has organized for Move Move Collaborative, an annual movement intensive where artists gather in Baltimore to make a performance by consensus. They have taught acting at Towson University, community movement research, and nature-based youth education. Matthew has BA in American Cultural Studies (Bates College) and an MFA in Theatre Arts (Towson University), has been published by Emergency Index, Witchcraft, Hyrsteria, and PotluckMag.  Their performance work has been presented by: Labbodies Performance Art Review,Transmodern Festival, and Baltimore Independent Dance Artists.  

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Chrissy Martin is an interdisciplinary performance artist and movement educator with roots in contemporary dance forms, Afro-Caribbean dance, postmodern experimental music, jazz vocals, and physical theater. Chrissy blends contemporary dance and language/voice to rigorously examine her intersecting queer and neurodivergent identities. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music with a focus on social praxis from New College of Florida in 2010 and received her MFA in choreography and performance from Smith College in 2022. Somatic practices such as Pilates, GYROTONIC® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style, and she is a certified Pilates and GYROTONIC® instructor. Martin is an avid member of the global contact improvisation community, and has facilitated and taught contact around the midwest.

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Lichen Bouboushian (they/them) is a genderqueer artist exploring lament as a form of critique and query into late capitalist woes. They utilize their experience in various somatic modalities to purposefully place their moving body and shapeshifting voice in uncomfortable, difficult situations. This is an attempt to shoot the quotidian psychological terror and apathy (i.e. the synthesized residue of on-demand streaming services, doomscrolling, virtue signaling, cultural amnesia, supply chain issues, civil forfeiture, etc.) through the body and back out to all of you. Refrigerated ancestral trauma and white guilt also make a consistent appearance. 

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In addition:

Chicago-based Costa Rican flutist Dalia Chin is a founding member of Fonema Consort and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, both of which are dedicated to performing music by living composers. She has been in residence and given performances at institutions including New England Conservatory, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Oberlin Conversarory, Harvard University, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Scripps College, UNAM (Mexico City), the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the 113 Composers Collective and North Central College. She has performed in festival and at venues including Visiones Sonoras (Morela), the Florida Flute Convention, Festival Interfaz (Monterrey), Omaha Under the Radar, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Festival Internacional de Chihuahua, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo ( Mexico City), the Teatro Sucre (Quito), the City of Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion, and National Sawdust.

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Ralph Darden is a Chicago-based musician, DJ & composer. As an adolescent he developed a profound love of hip hop, jazz, reggae, and punk. This played an essential role in the formation of his musical identity. 

He spent the 90s learning the process of writing, recording, and touring in several DIY punk bands. In the early 2000s, Darden was the founder, lead singer & multi-instrumentalist of the dub-infused post punk group, The Jai Alai Savant. He currently tours and performs as a guitarist and backing vocalist with Ted Leo & The Pharmacists.

Darden composes music for films & television. Some examples of his previous work include Polish Bar (2010), The Inheritance (2011), Lac Du Flambeau (2012), Comcast’s Gross World (2012) and Mondo Media’s Happy Tree Friends (2015), As well as commercial work for Hasbro’s Transformers Kreo (2016) and Melagro Tequila (2016). In 2021, he began his foray into the world of collaborative improvisation by providing live score for Yasmine Spiro’s visual art & dance performance titled Dawtas. 

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For nearly 3 decades, Darden has been DJing events around the globe under the moniker of “DJ Major Taylor”. Starting in Philadelphia in the mid 90’s, he states “..initially I just wanted to be a casual selector, playing roots and dub reggae records, but I found myself immersed in a world of really amazing hip hop DJs & turntablists & that influenced me in a big way.” As DJ Major Taylor, his scratch-laden, dance-friendly, genre-defying sets, showcase an ability to weave his eclectic palate of influences into a sonic tapestry, distinctly his own. His experience as a DJ has informed his recent experiments in beat-making and sound collage.

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Episode 6: October 22, 2022

Amanu started their storytelling journey through make-believe w/ their sibling creating worlds and characters to inhabit. Soon spiral notebooks birthed drawings, stories, and poetry. It wasn’t long until they fell in love with freestyling & helped form the rap crew, Jus-Us League. In 2001 they moved to Chicago &  joined the jazz-based band Daily Bridge Club. In 2007 joined the iNNERvISIONISTS, an organic Hip-Hop band. There, they met Casagrown, formed the rap duo BADWOLFF & performed all over Chicago at venues such as Beat Kitchen, Subterranean, Elbo Room, and The Mutiny. Amanu’s poetry stylings are rooted in rituals of storytelling & the delights of language.

 

Aza is a performance and visual artist and co-conspirator at No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab. This Coalescence is one to galavant in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, loose-tooth tanks, and the Heartspace. They organize Smudge Cinema Project, a now-and-then screening series that takes a look at what happens when a film is projected on a wall for people to watch. Metabolization seems to be what they appear to do, lately. 

Sara June is a Boston-based performance artist working primarily in butoh, movement improvisation and installation. She is the director of the annual Boston Butoh Festival and is co-director of Boston’s oldest experimental artists' collective, the Mobius Artists Group. She and sound artist Max Lord compose the performance duo Lord and June whose past commissions include a gallery performance for an exhibition of the acclaimed Hiroshima Panels by Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki at Boston University and an outdoor movement and spatialized-sound work for Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog x FLO installation in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace.

 

Max Lord is a Boston-based improvisor who has worked in a variety of rock, noise, electronic and improv settings. Though originally identifying as a percussionist, since 2000 he has performed with Buchla electronic instruments including the Marimba Lumina, an exotic mallet controller. His recorded work as Ghost Grass recalls mid-century electronic experimentation as often as more modern improvised approaches, and is intimately tied to the magnetic medium on which it is created.

 

Dubi Kaufmann makes interactive art. He uses code, cellphones, screen printing or bicycle parts to make art that sparks joy.

 

Christine Shallenberg is a multimedia artist whose work ranges in scale from performative physical encounters to mediated light and sound installations to participatory choreographies for audiences. Christine has been nominated for a Bessie (NY Dance and Performance Award) in visual design for David Neumann’s Restless Eye, for which she designed a system for scanning and translating the performers’ EEG brain waves into large-scale lighting shifts for the entire performance space. She also worked as the Lighting Designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for whom she designed Second Hand, Antic Meet, Nearly 902 and more than 30 unique Event performances seen around the world.

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Jinlu (see previous bio)

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Episode 5: May 28, 2022

Marcy Rae Henry es una Latina de Los Borderlands who studied stuff in Spain, India, Burma and Nepal, hitchhiked around France, Spain and Portugal and motorbiked through the Middle East. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and first prize in Ember Chasm’s 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest. Her writing and visual art appears in The Columbia Review, carte blanche, Epiphany, The Southern Review, Cauldron Anthology and The Brooklyn Review, among others. DoubleCross Press will publish her chapbook 'We Are Primary Colors' this year.  www.marcyraehenry.com

 

SheenRu Yong is a dance artist, choreographer, and the initiator of body portal theatre. She began dancing at Wesleyan University and then trained in New York City and Taipei, where she was commissioned and inspired to choreograph evening-length shows, site-specific works, and community-based performances. While earning her MFA in Choreography at the Taipei National University of the Arts, she toured internationally with Legend Lin Dance Theatre. Through the platform body portal theatre, she works to research and develop the creative potentials of the individual, collective, and environmental bodies we inhabit. She is currently based in Honolulu. www.bodyportaltheatre.com

 

Shoshana Green is an experimental artist using movement and image to study "process" and "relationships" within and between the quotidian, esoteric and one's living interiority. She works with the body as a sculptural representation, a mysterious territory of sensations and a channel for giving form to non-verbal narratives. Shoshana is a teacher, curator and presenter for Butoh Programming in San Francisco. She is also a somatic psychotherapist in private practice. 

www.butohsf.com, shoshanagreentherapy.com

 

Meenakshi is an emerging multidisciplinary artist who has incorporated experimental video, dance, and sound art in her work.  In her films, she often explores concepts around the interconnectivity of humans and our relationship with nature.  As a sound artist, she frequently mixes electronic sources with live vocals to create a variety of harsh, textural, melodic, and cerebral sonic experiences.  During these times, she seeks to enhance the physicality of sound and bridge the gap between virtual and in-person human experiences.  As a recent graduate of Mills College, she continues to draw from the school’s rich traditions of experimental electronic music as inspiration across all facets of her work.  Meenakshi is elated to be contributing to the local performing arts scene(s) here in Chicago.

 

Harlan Rosen performs like a playful kitty, getting stuck in a variety of boxes just for the joy of plotting their escape. As a mover and shaker, they have performed in ensemble works by Tadashi Endo, Joan Laage, Carole McCurdy, Ginger Krebs, and Mitsu Salmon, and have presented their own multimedia performances at Outerspace, Hamlin Park Theater, VHS, No Nation, and Elastic Arts. They live in a rent-controlled anterior temporal nucleus in your head, where they are currently dressed in drag as a duck and trying desperately to yodel.

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Episode 4: March 5, 2022

Yumiko Yoshioka (@yumiko-yoshioka) is a Japanese Butoh dancer and choreographer originally from Tokyo. Since 1988 she has been based in Berlin. Yumiko was a former member of Ariadone in 1974, the first female Butoh company, founded by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi. In 1978, she performed with Carlotta and Ko in Paris ” Le Dernier Eden- Porte de L’Au- Dela “, the very first Butoh performance to be presented in a public theatre outside Japan. In 1988 she became a co-founder of tatoeba THÉÂTRE DANCE GROTESQUE with Minako Seki and delta RA’i in Berlin. Between 1995-2015 she was a core member of TEN PEN CHii art labor, an interdisciplinary and experimental art formation as a dancer and a choreographer along with JoaXhim Manger (visual artist) and Zam Johnson (composer and musician). Since 1995 she has also set up various collaborative projects across Europe such as “eX…it!, Dance eXchange Festival” at Schloss Bröllin in Germany, dance projects with Gest-Azione, with Annalisa Maggiani from Italy; and dance creations with Rena Konstantaki from Greece. Many other collaborations with international artists and dancers encouraged Yumiko to unfold her own personal style of dancing and choreography.

 

Japanese-born sound artist Kikù Hibino (@kiku.hibino) produces electronic music that focuses on unusual rhythmic structure and melodies that are inspired by optical illusion and moiré patterns. From chamber music for media productions to digital micro sound for art installations, he has collaborated internationally with a wide variety of artists and scholars, including Yuge Zhou, Mitsu Salmon, Kawaguchi Takao (Dumb Type), Theaster Gates, Mike Weis (Zelienople) and Norma Field. His work has been shown in Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago Cultural Center, Three Walls, Compound Yellow, Elastic Arts, Hairpin Arts Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. He’s a 2017 Individual Artist Grant recipient from Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and 2021 Outer Ear Artist in Residency at Experimental Sound Studio. Kikù lives and works in Chicago.

 

Charles Joseph Smith (@charlessmith702210) is a renaissance man. Composer, dancer, writer, performance artist, pianist, poet, and graphic artist. He started doing performances in Chicago's DIY scene in 2005 starting as a pianist/dancer in Chicago's version of the John Cage Musicircus at the MCA in the Near North Side of Chicago, and re-appeared in the same "circus" in 2007 at the Chicago Cultural Center. As a pianist, Charles did a number of online and in-person performances, and had composed over 600 original and arranged music compositions. He is a crossover pianist - doing traditional and also avant-garde/creative improvisations on that instrument.

 

Carole McCurdy (@carolemccurdy) is a Chicago-based artist whose work addresses grief and anxiety, duty and resistance, and the absurd mysteries of embodiment. She received a 2016 Lab Artist award from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and was a Fall 2016 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Laboratories. She created and directed an ensemble piece, Waver, with support from CDF, HCL, and 3Arts Chicago. She’s been privileged to study with many masters of butoh dance, including Natsu Nakajima and Yoshito Ohno, and also with great teachers of Argentine tango. She has performed at spaces including the Chicago Cultural Center, Epiphany Dance, Links Hall, Hamlin Park, High Concept Laboratories, Defibrillator Gallery, and Movement Research (NY). In 2014 she danced under viaducts in downtown Chicago and then toured Indonesia with Nicole LeGette’s blushing poppy Dance Club. In 2008–09 she was awarded a six-month artistic residency at Links Hall, where she created and showed her ensemble piece Alas. For Redmoon Theater’s 2006 Twilight Orchard event in Columbus Park, she created A Cure for Scurvy, a performance installation one reviewer described as “an example of the way dread can be created virtually out of thin air.” M_m<M (they @mmmtvdotnet) is a visual & performance artist based in Chicago, Illinois. They investigate oppressive human histories in the inception and “successes” of Space Flight.

 

M_m<M creates work and research as an interdisciplinary alternative to current military investments and occupations in [outer]Space [e.g. NASA, SpaceX, Space Force, etc.]. M_m<M was an accomplished Photographer for NASA Glenn Research Center from 2004-2015 which informs their practice. They create art and open source {touchable} archives from NASA’s UNCLASSIFIED and discarded artifacts. They sing and speak truths of civil rights missteps in past Space Explorations and future colonization of MARS with their band ( ️) pronounced "Hypothetical Star” with current satellite engineer + bandmate ∅topia pronounced "nulltopia".

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Episode 3: November 12, 2021

Cristal Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens the viewer’s senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures. Her son, Julius Sabbagh joins her making his own music composed using app technology.

 

Mitsu Salmon creates interdisciplinary performance and visual works. Her work starts with personal or familial stories and branches out to speak to contemporary issues such as diaspora and the environment. Salmon received her MFA from SAIC and her BFA from NYU. She has presented work all over Chicago and internationally. She has participated in artist residencies such as at Taipei Artist Village and Oxbow. She was awarded a DCASE and Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. She is currently a resident artist at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and teaches art at Weber State University.

 

Sky Goodman is a multimedia artist, poet, and educator living in Chicago, IL. Sky’s formal training is in poetry with a background of teaching creative writing and literature to high school and college students. Currently they work full time as an artist, creating music videos for bands and minting NFTs on various platforms. They are the author of three published poetry books, “Starfish” “Deep Dream” and “Universal Texture.” Sky’s work has been exhibited internationally and in the metaverse.

 

Zoë Darling (Dowlen) is a multidisciplinary artist. She lives and works between London UK and Lucerne Switzerland.Her mainly performance-based practise covers diverse activities; from butoh to punk rock, somatic/embodied practices, bio hacking and poetry. Her work investigates the relationships between personal and the collective experience through imaginative adaptations and theatrical interventions. Natalia Nicholson is a Chicago performance artist. She currently makes music as part of Project Transcontinental. Her work focuses upon narrative, environment and personal identity.

 

Episode 2: August 13, 2021

Isaiah the Barbergod has been in this world for 29 years, father to a beautiful daughter, prince of peace lover of the arts and on a mission to build a better life. 

 

Fereshteh Toosi (they/them) is a learner and a nonbinary artist of Iranian and Azeri ancestry. Their artworks pose questions and foster animistic connections through encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. Fereshteh designs experiences that pose questions and foster animistic connections through encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry.

 

Noa/h Fields (they/them/theirs) is a genderqueer poet and performance artist from the West Side. They have written for Anomaly/Drunken Boat, Telekom Electronic Beats, and Bluestockings Magazine, among other online publications. Their first poetry book WITH is out from Ghost City Press. They are fond of techno and avocados.

 

Eryka Dellenbach is a nomadic, genderfluid, embodied filmmaker and performance artist from Chicago. Their embodied films and performances are rites of passage for themselves and collaborators driven by consent practices, inquisitive hedonisms, desire for connection and a belief in the capacity for healing through collaboration and art-as-life. Their works activate relationships to power, the malleability of consciousness and psychophysical thresholds in the service of defense training and realization.

 

Momo-dono is the alias of Nigerian African-American vocalist and former lead singer for The Claudettes, Yana Atim. Their moniker comes from the Japanese deity, Momotarou, who became a demon slayer while bringing peace and peaches to Earth. They are a multi-talented singer with a background in Jazz, French Yé-Yé and Classical Choral. In addition, they are drawn to a variety of music and sounds. Pulling from their indigenous roots, Momo-dono wants to uplift those with music while reviving classic forms of singing.

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Episode 1: June 5, 2021

Chloe Yu Nong Lin is a pipa musician and experimental composer from Taiwan. Lin graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Sound MFA. Her sound projects mainly focus on pipa improvisation and experimental composition. Lin's live performance centers on the relationship between the performing body and the instrument. Lin is also interested in transforming any kind of sound material into an improvisation instrument for her to do the live performance and live out her various creativities. 

 

Norman W. Long’s practice involves walking, listening, improvising, performing, recording and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about memory space, value, silence and the invisible. Norman finds inspiration in the Creative Music and electric imaginations of The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Pauline Oliveros, Phuture, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Hildegard Westercamp and King Tubby. Norman Long has performed and exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, Experimental Sound Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Iginition Project Space, Chicago Artist’s Coalition BOLT gallery, Compound Yellow, Green Line Performing Arts Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago Cultural Center and 2017 PRIZM Art Fair (Miami). Norman performed and toured with Angel Bat Dawid and the Brothahood and has performed with Damon Locks, Standing On the Corner, Cher Jey, Sara Zalek, Cristal Sabbagh, Dan Bitney and Todd Carter. Norman has received 3Arts Award for Visual Art in 2011, 3Arts Djerassi (Woodside, CA) Artists Residency Fellowship in 2014, BOLT Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2014-2015, 3Arts Fellowship for AS220 (Providence, RI) 2017 Artist in Residence program, Three Walls RaD Lab and Outside the walls Fellow for 2017-2019 and Guest Composer at EMS Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm, Sweden made possible in part by the City of Chicago’s DCASE grant. Norman was named one of Chicago’s to 50 artists by New City Chicago in 2020.

 

Luc Mosley specializes in woodwinds and electronics. His style draws inspiration from jazz, classical, ambient, and electronic dance music. Utilizing a blend of woodwinds and electronics, he draws upon sounds of the past to forge new pathways for music of the future.

 

Adrian Wood creates soundscapes, videos, transmissions and live works featuring sounds of water and wind, howls, whispers, seismic vibrations, and radio interference. Their work deals with sonic overlaps across identity and landscape.

 

Adrian has shown work in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Links Hall (Chicago), Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago),  Institut für Alles Mögliche (Berlin), Hundred Years Gallery (London), Gallery 062 (Chicago), LITHIUM gallery (Chicago), and the College of William & Mary. Adrian’s work has been featured in online broadcasts and publications like Hyperallergic, Radio Borealis, Collective Terrain and Bivouac Recordings. Adrian has received a number of scholarships and grants from Mana Contemporary Chicago, the Vermont Studio Center, The University of Michigan, Ox-Bow School of Art, Second Street Gallery (Virginia), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), the College of William & Mary (Virginia), and the University of Chicago.

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Kyle Gregory Price is a critically acclaimed, genre-fluid composer, percussionist, turntablist, and stop-motion animator raised in a one stop-light town in upstate New York. Following college and a decade in the punk, noise, and new music scenes on the east coast, he moved to Chicago in 2010 to expand his collaborative community and opportunities for composing, performing and creating. He has worked with numerous local artists such as Ben Lamar Gay, Mabel Kwan, and Sara Zalek and organizations including Third Coast Percussion, the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe, NON:op Opera, and Theater Y among others.

Kyle has performed at the MCA, Art Institute of Chicago, The Newberry, Thirsty Ears Festival and in Experimental Sound Studio’s 2018 Oscillations solo and Florasonic Series with Stephan Moore. In 2014 Kyle co-founded, with Deirdre Harrison, the intergenerational literacy chamber band The Lucky Trikes, who have recorded two albums at ESS.