At the August edition of our CLEAT Series, we’ll be experiencing three solo performances that utilize a theatrical / performance approach to spatial composition. Asterion is an audiovisual adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’ mythological short story The House of Asterion with animation and music by Alexander Dupuis (he/him). Featuring a newly spatialized soundtrack and narration adapted for the CLEAT system, Asterion renders the setting of Borges’ story as a brutalist labyrinth, its walls crawling with synthetic patterns and dead static. Within its web of corridors we follow a tale of monsters, heroes, and the search for liberation from an existence of infinite repetition.

CLEAT Series curator Matt Test will present DOWN: A GRAVITY OPERA. In this story Roger Babson loves America and hates Gravity, but he’s standing on a cliff overlooking a new manifest destiny, and it’s a long way down to election day. We’ll hear a stump speech operetta about rising, falling, and the limits of urgency and will have T-Roy Martin playing as Roger Babson.

Sam Anthem’s Creature is a research and performance project that activates archives of banned books and rhetoric used to justify their banning. Traversing materials and formats such as book pages, wearable electronics, movement, political speech, and literary spoken word, “Creature” is a meditation on how books can be both reduced to and rise from the monstrous.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID – Tickets Available at the Door

Artist Bios

Sam Anthem is an interdisciplinary sound, performance, and media artist who seeks to illuminate, turn upside down, and animate naturalized status quos. Weaving conceptual threads across archives, bodies, species, and sociality, their work addresses knowledge systems and material relationships through sonic, technological, and performative encounters.

Alexander Dupuis is an animator and musician based in Chicago. His recent animated short films and music videos depict fantastical worlds that draw on the aesthetics of science fiction cartoons, as well as the flashing lights and abstract patterns found in experimental film and video. He received his Ph.D. in electronic music and multimedia from Brown University in 2020, and has been commissioned for a variety of projects relating to animation, mixed reality development, and creative coding. He has performed as a guitarist in several experimental and new music groups including the Happy Valley Band and Verdant Vibes.

Matt Test is a Chicago-based composer, writer, and interdisciplinary sound artist whose work has been featured everywhere from living rooms and community gardens to Steppenwolf Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. As an ensemble member with the Curious Theatre Branch, one of the city’s oldest fringe companies, he has created and/or helped devise a number of experimental operas, new music theatre works, and soundscapes that play in the spaces between surrealist thought games and structural absurdity. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Sound Art and Industries from Northwestern University.

Official Website

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Tags: Alexander Dupuis, Alexander Dupuis ‘Asterion’, Chicago, CLEAT Series: Sam Anthem, Elastic Arts, Logan Square, Matt Test, Matt Test ‘Down: A Gravity Opera’, sam anthem, T-Roy Martin