SMACT Ensemble
Yes Yes Nooky
Paul Giallorenzo
Caroline Jesalva
We have a very special Elastro series to close out 2025! Join us for the debut of the SMACT Ensemble, featuring Cristal Sabbagh, Jayve Montgomery, Kim Alpert, Chris Corsano, and Nick Turner. These five are such integral parts of our vibrant Elastic community, and this particular quintet might blow the roof off our building with sound, movement, and video.
"Yes Yes Nooky," takes inspiration from the evocative Barbara Hammer work "No No Nooky T.V." (1987), an exploration of desire, technology and queer expression in a political moment in which sex was radical and pathologized. While considerably different from the HIV/AIDS era Hammer worked through, our current political moment restages similar conservative, repressive sycophants under the guise of “family values,” in an effort to bulldoze difference. This performance reclaims the perverse, the sex positive, the immature and the inappropriate as a methodology to resist our most recent tyranny. Dirty words, lyrical play, flashes of naughty bits, and oversexed/stimulated images ask the audience to partake in a process of building a licentious space for resistance.
We’ll open the evening with a first time trio of Paul Giallorenzo on keys/synth, Caroline Jesalva on violin, and Tyler Damon on drums. Music at 8pm!
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Cristal Sabbagh (she,her,hers)-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 viewers’ senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures. In various configurations, these collaborators have regularly engaged in improvised performances, opening up new avenues for Sabbagh’s material and conceptual exploration. She is the creator and curator of Freedom From and Freedom To events that are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound.
Jayve Montgomery (he, him)- With the ever increasing ability to be anywhere and everywhere else, now remains an elusive destination. Reconciling the past with the future, JayVe Montgomery's work is time traveling to the pre(-)sent, the gift of now. His work reveals his adherence to improvisation and chance as a way to explore evolutionary learning, dreams, democratic polylogue and unintended subjective meaning through randomized being.
Kim Alpert (she/they) - Combines analog and digital technologies, movement, music, and interactivity, to create sculptural and performance-based video systems. Kim's visual practice centers on humanism with inquisitions into psychology and spirituality - understanding and translating the impact of visual language to create meaning.
Kim uses a range of technologies, feedback, archival and found footage to weave dream tapestries both recorded and improvised. A significant part of Kim’s performed work is in collaboration with improvisational musicians, blending pre-rendered content with live visualizations. Alpert's work has been presented at The Art Institute of Chicago, Symphony Center, SOFA Expo, The Stony Island Arts Bank, The Walker Art Center, Roulette Intermedium, Bimhuis, as well as numerous alternative art spaces, galleries, and festivals internationally.
Chris Corsano (he,him)- (b. 1975, USA) is a drummer who has been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late 1990's. He's been the rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of "jazz" (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen) and "rock" (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O'Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee).
Nick Turner (he,him)- Nick Turner is a Chicago based musician and clinical social worker that utilizes music and sound creation as a vehicle for emotional experiencing and expression.
Benjamin Rosenthal (b.1984, New York, NY, Lives and Works in Kansas City, Missouri) holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Art (Electronic Time-Based Media) from Carnegie Mellon University. His work across media explores what he theorizes as queer “technosexuality” and challenges the supremacy of physical contact in a technocultural age. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Expanded Media in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
Eric Souther (b.1987, Kansas City) holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and an BFA in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute.His creative research draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including new materialism, anthropology, ritual, deep time, and toolmaking. Souther is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.
Originally from Long Island, NY, Paul Giallorenzo is a Chicago-based improviser, composer, producer, and sound designer using piano, synthesizer, keyboards, and electronics. His work has been praised for its “inside-out” nature – his ability to push the boundaries of “conventional” jazz toward more freedom but also, on the other side, to bring a measure of structure to more avant-garde material. Writing in the online journal Point Of Departure, John Litweiler said, “His solos and aggressive duets are gems of after-Bop, after-Bley melody,” while AllAboutJazz.org lauded music that “smudges the lines between the tradition and the avant-garde.”
Current working projects as a (co)leader include the Paul Giallorenzo Trio (w/ Joshua Abrams and Mikel Patrick Avery), Hearts & Minds (with Jason Stein/Chad Taylor), RedGreenBlue (with Ryan Packard, Ben LaMar Gay, and Charlie Kirchen), and a collective trio with Gerrit Hatcher and Julian Kirshner. His work can be found on the Chicago-based Delmark Records and Austin-based Astral Spirits labels, as well as various other imprints including Leo Records (UK), Not Two Records (Poland), and 482 Music (NY).
Giallorenzo is the Artistic Director of the intermedia arts organization Homeroom and a co-founder and programmer of the music venue/art gallery Elastic Arts, producing hundreds of creative music concerts and art events in Chicago since 2001.
Tyler Damon (b. 1987, Cincinnati, Ohio) is a drummer, improviser and educator. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.
In addition to solo work, Tyler’s contemporary outfits include a longtime duo with saxophonist Dave Rempis, as well as a quartet alongside Rempis, Jason Adasiewicz and Joshua Abrams. He is found frequently in duet with tenor saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher, expanded in trio with bassist Andrew Scott Young. Where Were We, a triad completed by Erez Dessel on keys and Beth McDonald on tuba and electronics, was formed in 2023. Tyler is also often seen and heard accompanying guitarist Eli Winter in the company of Sam Wagster on pedal steel.
Tyler has earned recognition previously for extended duo exhibitions with guitarist Tashi Dorji. Their trio Kuzu, also featuring Dave Rempis, formed in 2017, leading All About Jazz to insist that their work “is for audacious listeners and it isn’t like anything else.” He has also been recognized for his past work with bassist Darin Gray as Duo Oninbo, the Mars Williams-led Exit Plan (with Brian Sandstrom & Steve Marquette), and Haley Fohr’s chameleonic Circuit Des Yeux, among many others.