11/06/2018
We are thrilled to host four theater-makers and musicians from the Ilkhom Theatre of Tashkent, Uzbekistan and the Bata Theatre of Almaty, Kazakhstan. They will be in residence November 6 – 15, and we’d love for you to join us for a variety of workshops and events.
MASTER CLASS / Fri Nov 9, 12:30 – 3:20p, Logan Center 501
A presentation by Artyom Kim (see bio below) on the method of collective resonance composing (MCRC), a unique system of organizing a creative process with the fundamental principle of making art within a collective of creators. MCRC is the result of long-term research by composer and director Kim, together with the ensemble for contemporary music Omnibus and Ilkhom Theatre.
The presentation will be followed by a studio class led by Bata Theatre’s Veronika Nasalsayaka (see bio below).
Experience not required. Spaces are limited. Please contact Leslie Danzig ([email protected]).
TAPS WORKSHOP / Tuesday November 13, 4:30 – 6p, Logan Center 701
The artists-in-residnece along with Leslie Danzig, Assistant Professor of Practice in TAPS, and Leah Feldman, Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, will lead a workshop around issues in adaptation and translation.
PERFORMANCE & DISCUSSION / Wed Nov 14, 6-8:30p, Gray Center Lab in Midway Studios
Sidebar Series presents Mobilizing through Improvisation: A Global South & Southside Chicago Collaboration
This project stages an improvisational collaboration between local electronic musician Brother El from the south side of Chicago with actors and musicians from Ilkhom and Bata theaters of the post-Soviet south, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The collaborative work is centered on the concept of ‘translations’ and is structured around five vignettes from Central Asian poetry, bringing classic Central Asian instruments and synthesizers into a transnational dialogue about movement, connection, sonic mixing, fusion, synthesis and layering.
ABOUT THE THEATRES & ARTISTS
The Ilkhom Theatre is one of the first non-governmental professional theatres in the history of the Soviet Union, founded in 1976 by Mark Yakovlevich Weil and a group of graduates of the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. A studio-based theatre, Ilkhom engages its young adult acting students in its performances. The theatre focuses on diversity, producing many plays based on translations of ‘World Literature,’ problematizing the term by generating pieces that engage with the multi-lingual and confessional cultural environment of Tashkent Uzbekistan and its Uzbek, Tadjik, Russian, and Yiddish as well as Islamic, Judaic, and Orthodox Christian communities. In this way, the theatre expresses the at once deeply local and cosmopolitan character of the city. In September of 2007 after the murder of its founder Mark Weil, his former student Boris Gafurov became the artistic director and the theatre was renamed “Ilkhom,“ the theater of Mark Weil.
The BATA Theatre is an independent theater founded by Veronika Nasalskaya in 2017, which produces performances that incorporate traditional Central Asian music and poetry with electronic music and movement work, translating canonical poetic texts to a contemporary context to raise issues around representations of gender and race in post-Soviet Central Asia. The brainchild of the theater was the play ErTostik Groove, a modern epic involving two actors and a sound-transformer. They have collaborated with both the Ilkhom theatre and Omnibus musical ensemble.
Comparative Literature promotes the multidisciplinary, historically self-reflective and cross-cultural study of texts, traditions, and discourses.
