Essay on Resonance is a 60-minute solo performance by Corey Smith, a Chicago-based performance artist and composer. The work unfolds as a live essay in sound, speech, light, and shadow, exploring resonance as both a physical phenomenon and a framework for thinking through trans embodiment, instability, and relation.
A solo tour-de-force, Essay on Resonance plays with the spectacle of the “one-man-show.” From onstage, Smith controls bare-bones rock concert lighting, live projections, and sonic processing, switching modes rapidly between performance lecture, pop concert, shadow puppet show, and ambient-folk musical encounter. Meaning emerges associatively through accumulation, interference, repetition, and drift — much like the nebulous way we make sense of our own bodies.
Lyn Corelle opens the evening with a hybrid set of short films, live banjo, and readings from their writing.
Corey Smith (they/them) is a composer, writer, and performance artist from Chicago, Illinois. Interested in critical regionalism, the sensuality of performance, and a queer sonic ecology, their work ignores the boundaries of what music, text, or performance might be. They dip in and out of genres, mashing together the spectacle of a pop concert, the heady analysis of a lecture, the formal experimentation of a performance art happening, and the material transformations of a puppet theater.
Their work has been seen across the US and Europe, at venues including the Steppenwolf Theater, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Mattress Factory, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Chicago International Puppet Festival. They have been an artist in residence at Saari Residence, Vashon Artist Residency, ACRE, High Concept Labs, the University of Illinois Springfield, Light Box Detroit, the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, and Grin City. Their work has been featured by Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, and the Chicago Reader.
They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Corey Smith Website
Corey Smith on Instagram
Lyn Corelle on Instagram
Tickets are $12 in Advance / $15 at the Door. Doors open at 6pm. Online ticket sales end at 5pm.
Our full restaurant and bar service is available in the theater! Order from your seat and enjoy the show, we'll take care of the rest.
We recommend arriving early to grab a drink and find your spot; please keep in mind that we stop seating 30 minutes after the show starts.We do not do refunds or exchanges.