Before each of her performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cellist Katinka Kleijn applies makeup. A good amount, as it is for the stage. In February, the South Loop resident, overwhelmed by the growing number of friends being diagnosed with cancer, began researching cosmetic ingredients on a database from the Environmental Working Group. “On the EWG website, I found an oil-free blush I had been using for ten years,” Kleijn says. “It was rated a nine out of ten for most hazardous.”
Around that time, Matti Bunzl, newly appointed director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, was taking in a performance by jazz saxophonist Greg Ward. But he was most drawn to the accompanying cello player, Kleijn. He decided on the spot he had to convince the versatile musician to curate a concert for his 2010 fest, which he was organizing under the theme of the body. “I immediately thought of the research I was doing,” the cellist tells us. “About how unhealthy my cosmetic products were—makeup, facial moisturizer, shampoo and soap.” Kleijn was not new to advocacy through music: She’s one half of the Relax Your Ears project, an album themed around tinnitus and steered by suffering guitarist Joel Styzens.
The Dutch-born cellist has collected a battalion of admiring colleagues and fans through both her remarkable command of the instrument and her lack of pretension. Meeting the youthful performer, it’s difficult to imagine her career with the CSO began 15 years ago, but Kleijn’s popularity stems largely from other stages. As a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she often can be seen at the Museums of Contemporary Art or Photography, tearing into the unyielding scores of composers like Iannis Xenakis or Elliott Carter. She also can be found improvising riffs with the Greg Ward Sextet or burning up the fingerboard of an electric cello with local prog-rock dynamos District 97.
For the project of translating science into sound, Kleijn selected seven Chicago or Chicago-affiliated composers. She asked each to select one of the chemicals included in her oil-free blush as the title for a solo cello movement.
Many, like 23-year-old Megan Grace Beugger, were unaware of the research linking makeup ingredients like parabens, preservatives that can mimic estrogren, with breast cancer. For Grace’s movement, titled “Fragrance,” Kleijn delicately then violently draws her instrument across a bow that’s affixed to a stand. The traditional placement of the instrument is inverted, inspired by the subsurface threats of beauty products. For toy-piano expert and composer Phyllis Chen, “Oil-Free Blush” took on cultural implications. “I have been shocked by the Asian ideal of beauty as a flawless, porcelain white face,” the 32-year-old says. “Asian women are seeking a monotonous idea of beauty that erases their own individuality, emotions and expressions.” For her movement, titled “Aluminum 40 Lake,” Chen mimicked the effect of heavy makeup by adding multiple layers of loops, eventually distorting the original piece and ending with dramatic fire.
Sebastian Huydts, Columbia College’s director of keyboard studies, generally steers away from politically charged subject matter in his works. Yet for the 44-year-old, the topic was inescapably personal. “My dearest friend Elise is going through an agonizing battle with breast cancer, and I feel powerless,” he says. “I felt it was my duty to give it serious thought.” Huydts’s experience illustrates the central reason why “Oil-Free Blush” stands out amid a diverse festival boasting names such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dan Savage and Sam Shepard: No one is untouched by cancer.
Cosmetics may be only the tip of the carcinogenic iceberg, but with advocates such as Chicago’s first lady of the cello getting the word out, the list of potential hazards avoided grows. As Huydts notes, “Nobody leaves a Katinka performance untouched.”
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on November 10th, 2010