This Sunday at 1 pm, and again Monday night at 7:15, the Naro will revive a welcome tradition by screening a silent classic with live piano accompaniment.

Far more than an old-timey nostalgia gimmick (even most seniors these days were in fact born after the rise of the talkies), these silent screenings offer an immersive communal experience long thought lost in today’s home video wasteland.

This time out, the main feature is another gem from the stone-faced genius Buster Keaton, Our Hospitality. A pioneer in the comedic field of unconventional but absolute logic, Keaton was also a brilliant athlete who performed his own masterful stunts, indelibly influencing more modern physical comedians such as Jackie Chan.

You probably remember Keaton for standing still as the frame of a house collapsed behind him and he happened to stand directly where the empty window frame landed. His blank expression characteristically did not change.

“Silent movies” is a bit of a misnomer, as even before the industry-revolutionizing innovation of synchronized recorded sound, the (at the time live) audio accompaniment was at least half of the “silent” cinematic experience. In most houses the task fell to a single pianist, who became a musical juggler, flipping between prepared scores to carefully placed cues, playing to the audience and playing to the film’s service. Back in the days when vaudeville and silent cinema were symbiotic blockbuster entities that would put the current Judd Apatow factory to shame, these key-pounders were seen as dime-a-dozen laborers.

Today they would be hailed as musical magicians.

A melodic wizard is just what the Naro has up its sleeve in Chris Kypros. The Kyproses (Kypri?) are a constantly surprising performance dynasty in Norfolk, full of admirable and memorable local efforts and shocking big-city training. The first Kypros I met was Jason, a local actor and damn fine stand-up comic. He’s also a deft bartender, which probably has enriched my friendship with him far more than hustling to get spots on his old comedy showcase at Enrico’s.

At some point, Jason brought up his father, the classically trained pianist. That is where I figured out that Jason’s dad Chris was the guy who had amused and amazed me so much at the Naro when they ran silents. Of course I had come to admire Jason, because he had a seemingly effortless grasp of a writing and performance medium I’ve grappled with for the last five years. But what his dad did playing piano for old movies? That was really good. Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Chris, who proved every bit as engaging as his talented son. If he was giving me strong cocktails and sneaking free shots of bourbon through the phone, he might have rendered his son redundant.

“The first thing I do is to turn the sound off,” says Kypros.

Kypros watches the movies without any sound until he figures out a central (musical) theme to center his performance around. As much as thinking of himself as a composer, he likes to see himself as a musical sound effects guy. Though, like formative ’90s rappers, he never writes down a note, he seeks to match the onscreen action as much as possible. He estimates that only about a third of any show is planned, and the rest is improvised with markers in the show to keep him on track.

Seeing a silent movie live at the Naro, you essentially get a series of witty and precise Chris Kypros improvisations tied to key points in the film. An element of Kypros performances that always pleases crowds and proves his independence from old songbooks is his inclusion of modern themes in the show.

“Those things could be from a commercial or a TV show I just saw,” says Kypros. He revealed a sneaking urge to sneak the theme to “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” into this weekend’s show, which is a family feud story based partially on the Hatfields and the McCoys. Of course, sometimes he will forget an obvious melody he planned, landing him back at the bedrock of clever improvisation.

The piano man of the hour.

I had always pegged the Kypros clan as northern transplants. This area has such an inferiority complex that we assume our well spoken and literate peers must come from somewhere else, as if we are random anomalies who somehow learned to read and write despite a tragic upbringing in Norfolk. It turns out Chris Kypros, the acclaimed classical pianist and Julliard graduate, grew up around Ward’s Corner and got his bachelors from ODU.

“I was sort of like the kid from the farm but not…” Kypros reflected on his five odd years in New York. Where his peers in America’s most prestigious performance art academy were often pushed into training and auditions from pre-pre-adolescence, Chris had no training growing up beyond weekly piano lessons. Beyond ODU, Julliard was the only place he applied, and after a few years kicking around the cultural center of America post-graduation, he had no problem finding invigorating challenges right back where he came from, Southeastern Virginia.

Kypros did a bit of teaching in New York, but it became the closest thing to his proper profession in the 757 (quaintly known at the time as the 804). After a spell supporting himself with private lessons, Kypros wound up as a music instructor at the College of William & Mary before teaching at Norfolk Academy for a not shabby in the slightest 19 years. Notably, Kypros did not teach classical piano, but general music, as he continues to do today at St. Patrick Catholic School. The Kypri(?) are surprising that way.

Kypros was not content to settle into routine as a respected teacher and classical performer. Over the years, he found several unorthodox outlets for his talents, from supporting singing waiters downtown to performing with rock and jazz bands when the fancy struck him to serving as the musical director for the old Tidewater Dinner Theater at Lake Wright. None of these extra-curriculars have slowed his local work performing classical and chamber piano. What served Kypros so well as an assumed hayseed at Julliard has also made him a vital character for local music: adaptability. The man thrives on adventure and improvisation.

While his time in the trenches of dinner theater music may seem to be a clue to his current silent flicker mastery, the roots turn out to be much deeper and much more local. As a teenager, he used to collaborate with another local visionary in his church youth group, Thom Vourlas, on a nascent version of the local juggernaut now known (less imaginatively) as “Greekfest”, then known as the “Hellenic Women’s Club Bazaar”.

One year, Chris and Thom collaborated on a “spookhouse” element to the “Bazaar.” Part of the haunted house involved a projection of Lon Chaney’s iconic (and physically painful, make-up-wise) unmasking in the original Phantom of the Opera. When film scholar Vourlas found himself an adult running the boldest and bestest movie house in the area (the Naro, in case you didn’t know), he decided to revive a few times a year the giddy experience of watching the old mute classics live with a pianist. Luckily, the perfect performer to bring these nickelodeons to life was a childhood friend.

Incidentally, as this author has it, Buster Keaton is the best silent comedian ever, so this weekend’s screenings are indispensable. Kypros is more diplomatic about the silent kings, Charlie Chaplin being the other one. He does admit that Chaplin’s sentimental streak allows him to stretch out a bit and play more sad music. I didn’t think to quiz him on the unfairly overlooked Harold Lloyd (you have seen him dangling from a giant clock on a skyscraper) or the maybe/maybe-not fairly disgraced Fatty Arbuckle (you may have heard that he murdered a young starlet by raping her with a broken champagne bottle, and even the experts don’t agree on the truth of this story, but it sure did ruin his career).

In any case, silent movies at the Naro have become one of the few institutions here that never disappoint and always impress. In addition to the comedy features, the Naro has been bold enough to program historically significant and problematic films like Birth of a Nation, demonstrating their devotion to historical film awareness and dialog. Perhaps Chris Kypros says it best to encapsulate the integrity of himself and the Naro team.

“I want people watching to forget about the music,” says Kypros about his own performances. It was the same aim of the first Golden Age of Hollywood. Many departments defined and refined their craft to serve the picture so that the viewer, hopefully, did not even notice how they had been manipulated by the endless elements that figure into movies.

This invisible mastery is what Chris Kypros achieves with his piano, and the Naro accomplishes with their programming.