Guitarist

Join iconoclastic guitarist Kaki King and multimedia company GLITCH for BUGS-a one-of-a-kind, interactive musical adventure for all ages. Featuring King's signature guitar projection mapping, drum-triggered lights and sounds, and playful visuals, BUGS invites audiences into a whimsical world of insects, beetles, spiders, and sweet surprises. As King's live guitar performance fuses with mesmerizing video, nature soundscapes, and vibrant effects, kids and adults alike are encouraged to dance, shout out favorite bugs, and jiggle along with the critters crawling across the guitar. Designed to delight young audiences and the young at heart, BUGS transforms the stage into a multisensory playground where music, light, and imagination collide.

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Kaki King: BUGS

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Guitarist and composer Kaki King, named as one of Rolling Stone’s “250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” in 2023, brings a fun-filled story of bugs, beetles, critters, and all things sugar to the Harris Theater with BUGS. This new work has been created specifically for young audiences to bring together music, design, and technology in a live performance that is accessible for children of all ages.

BUGS

Harris Theater

Composer and musician Kaki King is considered one of the world’s greatest living guitarists, known both for her technical mastery and for her constant quest to push the boundaries of the instrument. Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” Kaki has released nine albums and toured extensively, presenting in such prestigious arts centers as the Kennedy Center, MoMA, LACMA, The Met and Smithsonian Design Museum. She has created music for numerous film and TV soundtracks, including August Rush and Into the Wild, for which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score.

Kaki King

The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center

In her continuous quest to explore the outer bounds of what is possible for the guitar, SEI is a new full-length performance piece where guitar movement takes over the entire stage. In SEI (which means "six" in Italian), guitarists become dancers, coordinating their whole bodies to perform the rigors of both choreography and composition. Multiple guitars on stands are spaced out strategically, in a design allowing for music and movement to be created between them. In SEI, the relationship between the players is revealed musically and physically, a progression of distance and space -- like the progression between the six individual strings of the guitar.

The Studio at 414

Kaki King has spent her career deconstructing and redefining the boundaries of the guitar, exploring its limits through technique, imagination, and seemingly boundless humanity. Her latest album Modern Yesterdays is a response to the unique time dilation of the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring several songs written as part her experimental theater piece “Data Not Found,” a rumination on themes of connection, alienation, and rebirth. Recorded in Brooklyn with Arjan Miranda and sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson, King’s poly-harmonic and -rhythmic approach wields abundant articulations of post-classical, jazz, folk, and blues motifs. In Modern Yesterdays live, King continues to refine her now signature projection mapping performance alongside a new approach to storytelling. Using visually imaginative and carefully choreographed guitar (and drum) performance, Modern Yesterdays bridges what fans have come to love about Kaki King.

Kaki King: Modern Yesterdays

McCarter Theatre Center

Rolling Stone Magazine has called Kaki King “a genre unto herself.”  Known for both her technical mastery over the guitar and her constant quest to push the boundaries of the instrument, The New York Times praised King, saying she makes music as “ornate as a healing crystal.”

Guitarist

Kaki King

Events

Past events

Nov 15, 2025

Kaki King: BUGS · Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Nov 30, 2024

BUGS · Harris Theater

About

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