UNFORGOTTEN: BUTOH FOR 9/11 to Return to Times Square, Presented by Vangeline Theater
The free ensemble work features choreography by Vangeline with live cello by Katinka Kleijn.
Vangeline Theater, home of New York Butoh Institute, will present a performance of Unforgotten: Butoh for 9/11, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, on September 11, 2026 at 1PM in Times Square. The event is free to attend.
Unforgotten: Butoh for 9/11 is an ensemble work commemorating the victims of 9/11. The 60-minute Butoh dance piece will be choreographed by Vangeline and be performed by an ensemble of several dancers with live musical accompaniment by renowned cellist Katinka Kleijn. Dancers: Suyi Xu, Zo Roze, Dani Cole, Madelyn Sher, and Eilish Henderson. For more information, visit here.
Every year for the past two decades, Vangeline Theater has held public 9/11 commemorative performances in New York. For the past ten years, we have performed these offerings in Times Square, with a special dedication for the firefighters, policemen, and women who lost their lives on 9/11. Our annual performances in Times Square on 9/11 hold deep symbolic and cultural significance. The act of performing Butoh-a meditative, expressive dance form-on such a solemn occasion creates a space for collective mourning, remembrance, and healing. Given Times Square's status as a global landmark and cultural epicenter, the performances serve as a poignant tribute to the victims of 9/11, while also offering an artistic reflection on resilience and loss.
This program is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, and the City Council.
A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble, Kleijn premiered Dai Fujikura's Cello Concerto, written for her, at Lincoln Center, NYC, premiered Anna Thorvaldsdottir's newest chamber work Ubique at Carnegie Hall, NYC, and is an upcoming featured artist at the Ojai Music Festival 2025. She recorded for the Sony Classical Japan, Naxos and Drag City labels, and presented solo multimedia shows at the Library of Congress and North Carolina Performing Arts.
As a featured VIP contemporary artist at EXPO Chicago in April 2025, Kleijn will perform her solo work Scratching. In October 2025, The Momentary Museum at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, AK will showcase Kleijn's site-specific audiovisual installation utilizing the museum's 80-foot-tall LED tower, at the opening of their annual Momentous Festival.
Much of Kleijn's work illuminates the cello's anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago's Eckhart Park Pool for their devised work Water On the Bridge. Kleijn's The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) similarly probes the parallels between human and cello bodies, expressed through a shared-circuit synth. RESIDUUM (2022) pairs Kleijn's cello with unexpected materials, like 400 feet of mylar or a dress made of soda cans. Her collaborations with the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn's cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called 'a balancing act for Kleijn's whole body.'
Her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), was presented at Big Ears Festival by Ensemble Dal Niente. Inspired by Civil War-era drum commands, it tasks two spatially separated ensembles with reacting in real time to each other's rhythms. Her silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) and her performance Conducted Vault, for Cellist, Synth and Vault (2022) explore touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.
Kleijn has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Christoph Eschenbach, Richard Goode, Lynn Harrell, Jeremy Denk, Stefan Jackiw, and the Marlboro Music Festival. She has taught at DePaul School of Music, Notre Dame University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and as Artist-in-Residence and Guest Lecturer at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada.
