Join us on Tuesday, December 12th at Elastic Arts for the premiere of a short film created by Mexico City-based Rhizomes Films featuring footage from Homeroom Residency with Katinka Kleijn in March 2023.
$FREE$ / Suggested Donation
Artist Bio
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.