First Volcano/Last Glacier

Performance, Bowery Arts + Science @ Bowery Poetry, NYC (2014)
co-conspirator: Treya Lam

And So. With only a few further thoughts about the futility of refrigerators in a melting world, we joined you all on the Voyage Great Thaw, a mission to visit the last glacier on Earth before it deconstructs. Before it becomes itself, only wetter. Before its blue cathedral monolith humbles, exhales, and crashes into the velvet sea...

"The meat of it, I believe, is to see that some things might really not change. We were born swimming in primordial soup, the captain reminded me, the thick borscht of life — with which we are still basically surrounding ourselves, the water that was our origin-stew wrapped around us in a layer of skin. Water plays a long game, she said, drawing on the word like a cigarette. When the seas rise, and here I noted her certainty — when the seas rise, the brief miracle of form will de-crystallize, will fall to the scaled expanse of formlessness, un-sculpture, joined in pure potentiality. Like laying your body down on a piano, I thought, all the notes at once, undifferentiated harmonies. Like the dinosaurs and the glaciers, she said, we will melt."

Video, music (piano, saxophone, digital sound design), movement, text ... jazz funeral for the world's last glacier.

original composition, structured improvisation

The audience became ship-mates on the boat, and they wrote letters to the last glacier that were read aloud and posted throughout the space.