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RESERVOIR 2
“The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences.” Kristen Iversen
BY SARAH HENNIES
MAINSTAGE SERIES: NOV 07 – 09, 2024, 7:30 PM → ST. PAUL’S EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL
Project [BLANK] presents the world premiere of RESERVOIR 2 by groundbreaking American composer Sarah Hennies. This evening-length work for choir and flute blurs the lines between performance and installation, and is based on the idea that the unconscious mind can act as a deep “reservoir” or repository for our most profound memories. Our new staging will activate and transform the vaulted spaces of St. Paul’s Cathedral, enveloping the listener in a constellation of voices calling out from the depths.
Featuring a new light and video installation designed by Allison O. Evans, and performed by the San Diego New Verbal Workshop.
Photo by Rob Davidson
SARAH HENNIES, COMPOSER
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
SARAH HENNIES, composer
ALLISON O.EVANS, visual artist
ZANE ALEXANDER, music director
VIKTOR DE LA FUENTE, movement director
TERESA DIAZ DE COSSIO, flute
SAN DIEGO NEW VERBAL WORKSHOP: Amelia Sarkisian, Andrew Walsh, Charissa Noble, Clara Boyle, Danielle Perrault, Dom Cooper, Isabella Pihas, Jasmine King, Lauren Bailey, Lily Yates, Mariana Flores-Bucio, Natalia Merlano Gomez, Rosalyn Arvizu
Allison O. Evans, VISUAL ARTIST
Allison Olivia Evans is a queer artist and theorist in the Art History, Theory, Criticism and Art Practice Ph.D. program at UC San Diego. They graduated with their MFA in Studio Art from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Evans’s work engages with new materialism(s), feminist ecologies, queer phenomenology, and photographic histories. They produce site-specific installations and experimental photographic works that explore entanglement; a concept used in the science studies writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad to describe both the heterogeneity and inter-connectivity of matter.
They have received awards and scholarships including the Redux Contemporary Art Center’s Award for Photography, the ISLA Graduate Student Research Award and the University of Notre Dame’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. Evans has presented their research internationally and was named the Philip C. Curtis Artist-in-Residence at Albion College in 2017. In the winter of 2019, they were invited to participate in the Nancy Holt Scholar’s Day at Dia Art Foundation.
SAN DIEGO NEW VERBAL WORKSHOP
San Diego New Verbal Workshop is a community choir formed in 2023. They perform vocal music from the mid-20th century to the present day, and maintain an open policy and welcome anyone who wants to sing, regardless of their experience level or music literacy. The choir’s mission is to provide a music-making environment that encourages people to engage with their voices and explore new performance concepts, embracing a wide range of expression.
Teresa Diaz de Cossio, flute
Teresa Díaz de Cossio is a flutist and an active member of in^set, a flexible chamber ensemble dedicated to creation, improvisation, experimentation, and collaboration. She has had the opportunity of performing with figures such as Los Tigres del Norte and Geprge Leswis. Teresa has been a fellow at The Banff Center, the Darmstadt Summer Institute, Curating Diversity (Sounds Now, Finland), and the Future of Music Faculty Fellowship (Cleveland Institute of Music, Sphinx Foundation). As a scholar, Teresa has presented her research on the composer Alida Vázquez at Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia's Computer Music Center and the International Musicological Society (Greece), and her work has been published in Radical Sounds of Latin America and the series Musicians’ Migratory Patterns by Routledge. Currently, Currently, a doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego and a co-producer at Neofonia, Festival de Música Nueva in Ensenada– a space for exploration and collaboration between communities. Teresa looks forward to making meaningful contributions to the community, both through her performances and her scholarly pursuits. She is excited to join the Density Fellows program with Claire Chase.
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