Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 - Waning Crescent

On March 25, the moon is 25 days old and 25% illuminated. In Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 - Waning Crescent, we reflect upon a phase of the moon associated with surrender, rest, reflection, and healing in a movement and music improvisation on time: time passing, time lost, time remembered. With a soundscape of a dawn chorus and fragments of Nina Simone, shared meditations, and shared motions, we bid farewell to winter and welcome spring.

Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 is a performance installation and community art project created by Irene Hsiao as part of her year-long residency at Hyde Park Art Center that bridges places and people, times and cultures. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 - Waning Crescent

Irene Hsiao, Norman W. Long, Sharon Udoh, and Sara Zalek

March 25, 2025

5:30-6:15pm

Hyde Park Art Center Studio 10

Bios

is a dancer, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. She creates performances in conversation with visual art in museums, galleries, and public spaces, a practice that includes site-specific interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. She is a 2025 Radicle Studio Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center, the 2024 Resident Artist at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum of Art in 2020 and 2021, 2022-23 Fellow at High Concept Labs, first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel in 2022-2023, and a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. Her performances have been presented at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Textile Week, Ragdale Foundation, Krannert Art Museum, Alma Art Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and more.

’s multidisciplinary practice involves walking, listening, teaching, improvising, performing, recording, and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about memory, place, ecology, race, culture, value, silence, and the invisible. Norman’s practice has been influenced by the emerging practices and thinking of 1970s artists, musicians, critics, and designers regarding landscape and sound- specifically Rosalind Krauss’ article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” and the development of the acoustic ecology by R. Murray Schafer. The sounds found in his work has its inspirational roots in the Black music of house and techno, ‘free jazz,’ Great Black Music, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Pauline Oliveros, King Tubby, Dub, and the sounds of artists outside and in-between genres. Long’s improvisational and compositional strategies are inspired by Samuel R. Delany’s palimpsest text “Plague Journal '' chapter of Dhalgren (Science Fiction) and Atlantis: Three tales (Fiction) and Mark Bradford’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art: Chicago in 2011 featuring Bradford’s process of collecting and collaging, scraping and pasting materials sourced from his community in Los Angeles. Holding a Master’s Degree in "New Genres" from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master’s of Landscape Architecture degree from Cornell University (2008), Norman relocated to Chicago in 2008. His artistic endeavors have been showcased at diverse venues, including Experimental Sound Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Renaissance Society, Yale University, Illinois State Univerity Galleries, SAIC Sullivan Galleries, Chicago Artists Coalition Gallery, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Constellation, and the Arts Club as part of the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival.

is a Nigerian-American pianist, composer, arranger, curator, and vocalist based in Chicago. Their performances have been described as a warm bowl of soup, a tornado, a jalapeño pepper, a Jackson Pollock painting, a bulldozer, and magnetic. Her collaborators have included clipping., Tune-Yards, Cristal Sabbagh, Ben Lamar Gay, Angel Bat Dawid, and on this particular night, Irene Hsiao, Norman W. Long, and Sara Zalek. She recently curated a weekly artist series during a residency at the Stony Island Arts Bank, one of Theaster Gates' beautifully-renovated arts spaces on the Southside of Chicago.

is a transdisciplinary artist, producer, curator of Butoh related situations, and other bodily curiosities. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic. They make performances combining sound, movement, image and voice, host movement workshops, and dream of large sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections. Zalek performs very often in both live and online situations. They are a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2015), a 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee (2017), and Ragdale Foundation Fellow (2017). The City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022 for a Curatorial Grant Project with Elastic Arts Foundation for Hot Mess! virtual/irl hybrid performance events. They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, Chicago Parks District, Elastic Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Lumpen Radio, dfbrl8r, Headwaters Theater (PDX), Philosophical Research Society (LA), Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan, and many more. Through Butoh Curious Chi, Zalek connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music. Their teachers include many Butoh greats: Yoshito Ohno, Yumiko Yoshioka, Lori Ohtani, Koichi & Hiroko Tamano, Yukio Waguri, Joan Laage, Tadashi Endo, Yuko Kaseki, Mari Osanai, Natsu Nakajima, Ken Mai, Yumi Umiumare, Diego Piñón, Atsushi Takenouchi, Minako Seki, Ayako Kato. They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body.

Host or Publisher Irene Hsiao