FEATURE: CSO Proof—Black Being
We Keep Coming Flutronix wanted their next project to celebrate Black women. What grew from that seed exceeded their wildest imagination. by HANNAH EDGAR
Black Being begins the moment people step into the performance space, but it can’t continue until they actually start listening. As attendees fill in, they’re greeted by an undulating flute aspiration playing on loop. It crescendos, imperceptibly at first, until all pre-concert chitchat is drowned out by its lapping waves. That moment encapsulates exactly what Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull— Above: Flutronix performing the October 2021 premiere of Black Being at The Arts Club of Chicago. Credit: Sarah Elizabeth Larson Below, from left: Flutronix—Allison Loggins-Hull and Nathalie Joachim. Credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien
14 | FANFARE CINCINNATI
who perform together as Flutronix—aim to do with Black Being: reclaim the time, respect, and agency so frequently denied Black women. Through a thrumming electroacoustic soundscape and an epic, evocative text by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green, Joachim and Loggins-Hull share facets of their life they would otherwise never have imagined sharing in a classical concert setting: They play beans and rice like chamber music, reminiscent of Joachim’s long afternoons spent washing rice on the porch with her family in Haiti. They allow their bodies to slacken and rest, paper fans popping like the Baptist church ladies from Loggins-Hull’s youth. They command a roomful of people to transport themselves to the bloodstained hull of a slave ship…. Of Green’s poem, Loggins-Hull says, “The imagery is just so vivid. Reading it, I see the Middle Passage immediately, or I see those warm summer days. That’s my absolute favorite thing about this work: It’s just so true to, like, everything. It connects us all in this way that can’t even really be explained.” When Flutronix reflected on the experience of expanding Black Being for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from their respective homes earlier this year—Joachim in Chicago, LogginsHull in Montclair, New Jersey—they were still reeling from the thunderous premiere of the piece’s small-scale version in October 2021 at the Arts Club of Chicago, which co-commissioned the work alongside the CSO. Then, in February 2022, Joachim and Loggins-Hull returned to