Friday and Saturday, October 21–22, 2022
7pm doors / 7:30pm show
Tickets $25 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets for Friday
Get Tickets for Saturday
Chicago's underground gospel industrial project ONO premieres two one-hour theatrical performances at The Lab. These performances consider transhumanism, the multiplicity of death, organized religion, and the long arm of colonization. For this project, ONO will be invoking the language, visuals, and performative elements of Protestant tent revivals.
ONO members:
travis
P Michael Grego
Shannon Rose Riley
Rebecca Pavlatos
Dawei Wang
Connor Tomaka
Jordan Reyes
ONO bandleader P Michael Grego and frontperson travis met sometime before 1980, sharing a love for written and spoken word, the transcendent, and the genuine. Through continual poking and prodding, P Michael convinced travis to join him in ONO, whose name derives from shortening “onomatopoeia,” underscoring their desire to create “noise, not music.” P Michael handles the audio and travis the words. Since January 5, 1980, ONO’s roster has changed dramatically, but it always fiercely defends a singular construct, that ONO is a: “Experimental Performance, NOISE, and Industrial Poetry Performance Band Exploring Gospel's Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises.”
In a deeper consideration of ONO’s genesis, the band is rooted in events hundreds of years earlier. ONO tackles military history, religious history, racial history, geopolitical history, artistic history, and that’s only for starters. travis mentions real, often harrowing events, attaching years and dates, as if history were ever present.
https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/democracy-at-work-travis-and-p-michael-of-ono/
Photo by David Magdziarz