VIDEOS of post-premiere Newtown Odyssey inspired projects
CONFLUENCE (2024)
Dana Spiotta's libretto narrative, combined with a specific scenography, aims to make visible the field of possibilities of these aquatic environments relayed to peri-urban areas, as well as the unique ecological challenges imposed by industrial pollution. The result is a recognition of waterways as social spaces, as sites where landscape aesthetics can capture the messy ways in which we relate to natural and unnatural things. Marie Lorenz's video, which builds upon SCENE 6 from Newtown Odyssey - The Creek Being, invites us to reimagine these spaces through a body of work that often defies categorization, existing on the edge of the ephemeral and the tangible. Through this almost daily practice, she is part of a certain history of seascape art, as well as that of a multidisciplinary contemporary art that brings together performance, happening and mesological aesthetics.
gyre - - - tone (2024) for video and pre-recorded bass trombone
This post-Newtwon Odyssey project is a mediation on the opera after the premiere. Using footage recorded by artist Marie Lorenz, composer Kurt Rohde took recorded materials made by bass trombonist Blair Bollinger. Rohde used processing and overdubbing, creating a rumination on the physical space upon which the Newtown Odyssey project took place - Newtown Creek.
"gyre" is that long, slow current carrying us through life, inside which the "tones" circle – faster, compact movements mapping each chapter of the voyage. In the end, the "currents" of piece form a large loop.