høle in the skY: Zeitgeist New Music & Kathy McTavish

May 16 @ 7:30 pm
May 17 @ 7:30 pm (double feature with ørigin of birds)
May 18 @ 2:00 pm

Studio Z (275 East Fourth St. Suite 200, St. Paul, MN)

"last passenger pigeon
she slipped away
forever into sky
through iron bars
into blue …"

see: http://holeinthesky.blueboatfilms.com/
and: http://originofbirds.blueboatfilms.com/

tickets available at the door and at:
http://www.zeitgeistnewmusic.org/hole-in-the-sky.php

funded by an American Composers Forum JFund Commission

Please feel free to bring your devices to this immersive, live performance & installation … you will have the opportunity to wander / drill down / traverse / write to the screen …

from Zeitgeist
Join Zeitgeist and Duluth composer/cellist/environmentalist Kathy McTavish for the world premiere of her new chamber work Hole in the Sky. Featuring electronic and acoustic music, video, and an interactive exhibition, Hole in the Sky explores a pre-apocalyptic world where extinction is imminent and our ecosystem is on the verge of collapse. Drawing on McTavish’s past work in ecosystem modeling, the work considers the delicacy of ecosystems, our human quest to recover those systems, and what it might mean to be the last of a species left alive.

from Kathy

For the live performance of høle in the skY, I created a text / video / minimalist sound installation - a landscape - that encloses the 4 musicians. The core story revolves around planetary climate change / extinction. Specifically, the core text comes from a book I wrote in 2012 called: "night train / blue window" about the last passenger pigeon, Martha, who died in the Cincinatti Zoo September 1, 1914. Another text is laced throughout the piece in counterpoint. It is the story of a girl growing up on the Iron Range of Minnesota. This text is from the book: "Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range" by Sheila Packa. It provides an intimate human voice in a sea of rapid climactic change.

As a composer, improvisational cellist and installation artist, I am interested in the ways we stain each other. I am drawn to episodic stories, evolving myths, wandering installations, shifting landscapes, phantom exhibits, street music, ephemeral / improvisational / vanishing spaces, inarticulate languages, loose collaborations … the infinite between. høle in the skY is part of a larger wandering, episodic journey I took for about a year called radiø plutø / the schøol of impermanence. I think of this as a collaborative story caravan. I drew inspiration for the form from things like the Arabian Nights / Canterbury Tales or from loosely structured grassroots movements like Idle No More. This journey was enriched by collaborations with cross-disciplinary artists that I worked with along the way. I kept thinking about story looms, the act of weaving … or graffiti.