Antara Kyklos: Free Admission and Live Performance

Join us for a free-admission evening at the museum featuring a guided tour and a live performance created in response to Mayumi Lake’s exhibition Unison: Obsessive Eyes.

The evening begins with a free guided museum tour starting promptly at 6:00 PM, offering visitors an in-depth look at the exhibition and selected works on view. The tour will last approximately 30–40 minutes and will provide curatorial context for Lake’s practice, themes of perception and repetition, and the conceptual framework behind the exhibition.

At 7:00 PM, the evening continues with a live performance collaboration by Mayumi Lake, Sara Zalek, and Toki. Developed in direct response to Unison: Obsessive Eyes, the performance extends the exhibition into a shared, time-based experience, weaving together visual, sonic, and performative elements to explore attention, resonance, and collective presence.

Antara Kyklos — the inner interval, a returning circle.

This improvisational performance brings together Butoh movement and live koto music in a shared, evolving space. Through spontaneous interaction between body and sound, the work explores vulnerability, transformation, and inner cycles. Experimental and groundbreaking in approach, the performance expands the horizon of Mayumi Lake’s Unison series, giving new form to its imaginary flowers as they emerge, dissolve, and return.

Artist Bio:

Sara Zalek is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and producer. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation; their work is intimate, raw, and poetic. They have been conducting somatic research and teaching butoh for fifteen years, currently working with the Japanese Culture Center, Roman Susan Gallery, and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. Zalek performs often in both live and online situations; the City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015, 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee in 2017, and a Ragdale Foundation Fellow. ​

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). They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body.

Toki is an acclaimed musician and a proud member of the head family of the renowned Ikuta Koto School in Japan. She began studying Koto under her uncle, Shinzo Miyagi, the Ikuta Schoolmaster, earning her diploma in 2007.

Toki's musical journey started at the age of three with piano and solfeggio lessons. She later pursued advanced studies in piano at Senzoku Music University in Tokyo, Japan, graduating with honors.

She also collaborated with renowned YouTuber Rob Scallon, with their video amassing over 7 million views. Toki is dedicated to nurturing the next generation of musicians, teaching piano and Koto at her studio, “弦gen- keys”. 

Mayumi Lake (b.Osaka) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores the ideas of time, memory, and floating between the real and imaginary. With a foundation in photography, she integrates digital images of nature and Japanese textiles into her artworks to expand narrative and form conceptual layers. Lake’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, Asia Society, Art in General, and Artists Space in New York; Chicago Artists Coalition and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City; the Setouchi Triennale in Takamatsu;  Fotografie Forum International in Frankfurt; Galleria PaciArte in Brescia; FOTOAMERICA in Santiago. Her work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Asia Society. 

Admission is free, and seating/standing space for the performance will be available on a first-come basis.

RSVP needed.