Live Things - Proposal

LIVE THINGS MUSIC WRITTEN AND PERFORMED

BY TED HEARNE

POETRY BY DOROTHEA LASKY

PERFORMER/VISUAL ARTIST RACHEL PERRY PROJECTION DESIGNER PEABODY SOUTHWELL 12 songs, 75 minutes Ted Hearne, voice and electronics Ashley Bathgate, cello Nathan Koci, keyboards Taylor Levine, guitar Diana Wade, viola Ron Wiltrout, percussion

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The lush yet stark, intimate yet bold poetry of Dorothea Lasky is the inspiration for Live Things, a set of twelve songs performed by composer/vocalist Ted Hearne with a band of five musicians. This fusion challenges you to embrace wildness: Lasky’s poems and Hearne’s music lovingly complicate binary structures of the personal and domestic.

Wildness is the obsessive overtake of that which can’t be denied, that which follows its own principles— the excess, the never-ending identity that outlasts the body, neon in the field of black. Feeling is everything.

Conceptual artist Rachel Perry transforms the musicians, the space, and herself in real time, spreading detritus that nurtures an overgrowth that cannot be contained. Lighting and projection design by Peabody Southwell turns a stripped-down rock show into an art piece, into a living organism, a conceptual orgasm, a fruiting body, a bed of moss.

You Are Not Dead I would love you if you were dead But you are not dead you are alive Your body ringing in me, ringing true Ringing true, not like a blue nerve net Encased in black Not a red rubber heart encased in glass Not a burned out body encased in glass But a real thing, a soft thing A soft and wild thing I am so glad I left the world And found the wildness beyond in you I am so glad I was brave enough To leave the place in me that was not wild To go into the cave of life that is not dead

What you think when you are confused I knew that somehow in the midst of this confusion Was the true dawning of myself.

My soul was a man and like a man I would wander forever among the stars and flowers, lonely.

My heart a lonely star with no matching star Anywhere in the universe and even so Looking like a man for somewhere To rest my freedom and resent it.

THE CREATIVE TEAM Ted Hearne is a composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist noted for his “pan-stylistic freedom” (Pitchfork) and “wildness of spirit” (The New York Times).

Hearne's Sound From the Bench, a cantata for choir, electric guitars and drums setting texts from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times included Hearne’s oratorio The Source on its list of the best classical vocal performances of 2014, and (along with The New Yorker and The Nation) the best albums of 2015.

Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker "Hearne's piece holds up as a complex mirror image of an information-saturated, masssurveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact.”

Pitchfork called The Source "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory — from any genre."

Hearne’s latest dramatic vocal work Place, written with famed poet/performer Saul Williams and director Patricia McGregor, recently premiered at the 2018 BAM Next Wave Festival to critical acclaim.

Hearne performs with Philip White as the vocal-electronics duo R WE WHO R WE. His works have been conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams and Gustavo Dudamel. Recent collaborations have paired him with director Daniel Fish and legendary musician Erykah Badu.

Dorothea Lasky is an American poet, and the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Milk (Wave Books, 2018); Rome (Liverlight, 2014); Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012); Black Life (Wave Books, 2010); and AWE (Wave Books, 2007).

She has also authored numerous chapbooks and pamphlets, and she co-edited the book Open the Door: How To Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013).

“In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality,” poet Julia Bloch writes, “Lasky’s poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be.”

In 2013, Lasky was named a Bagley Wright Lecturer at Harvard University. She is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City.

The voices of Lasky’s poems are all women: women who cheat, women who menstruate, women who hate, and women who love. Driven by her intense admiration for Sylvia Plath and Bernadette Mayer, both of whom were female poets that broke traditional barriers of sex and poetic tradition, Lasky has greatly molded her into the fascinating writer that she is today- unafraid and unapologetic.

Rachel Perry is a New York-based visual artist and performer. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Baltimore Museum; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. She has had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 2014; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University; The Drawing Center, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and the Beatriz Esguerra Gallery, Bogotà, Colombia.

Perry has received four fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and is a three-time recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Excellence, the only artist in its history to win in three separate disciplines: Photography, Drawing, and Sculpture. She been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art:21, Sculpture, and created a four-page pictorial essay for Vogue. She has twice been commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, most recently for a feature on the “Me Too” movement.

Peabody Southwell has established herself as a multifaceted artist in a range of creative endeavors. As a director, designer and dramaturg she prioritizes bold collaboration across the arts in productions, installations and experimental events described by the LA Times as "the future of classical music." Recent credits include production design for the immersive multimedia installation Obsession & Creation at SoundBox with San Francisco Symphony, direction and production design of an experimental site specific performance titled MOTHER | SISTER, costumes for the US staged premiere of Jonathan Dove’s L’Altra Euridice, costumes for modern dance ensemble WIFE in an installation of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, dramaturgy and costume design of Iris with Bard Summerscape, costume design for On the Town with San Francisco Symphony, costume co-design for Daphne with the Cleveland Orchestra, costume design and co-direction in new productions of La voix humaine and Il segreto di Susanna with Opera San Antonio, curation and co-production designer for PULP, wild Up’s immersive multimedia installation at Music Academy of the West.

As a Grammy Award winning mezzo soprano recognized for her “stylistic mastery and ripe, sensual sound” (Opera Magazine, UK), Peabody has performed principal roles for the Metropolitan Opera, LA Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Carnegie Hall, Seattle Symphony, LA Philharmonic, New World Symphony and San Francisco Symphony and has been conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, James Conlon, John Adams and Robert Spano. A champion of new music, she is slated to premiere works for composers Jodie Landau, Nathaniel Stookey and Nico Muhly, whose US premiere of Marnie she recently sang at the Metropolitan Opera for their international broadcast. A native of Los Angeles, she frequently appears with LA Opera including the central role in 2016's world premiere of David Lang's Anatomy Theater helmed by Beth Morrison Projects, in an "electrifying" (Wall Street Journal) performance, leading Musical America to note, "Southwell gave another demonstration as to why she has become one of the most fearless, versatile young singing actresses on the stage today."

Blue Falling (2014) by Rachel Perry