The Lorelei, The Albatross and The Pine Tree

Montgomery Cultural Arts Center, Washington DC & The Arellano Theater, Baltimore. (Apr-May 2014)

During my year as a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Johns Hopkins’ Humanities Center, I joined The Parallel Octave Chorus, a Baltimore-based improvising chorus, founded in 2010, which records and creates poem-based live performances. I joined them for the mixed media piece The Lorelei, the Albatross and the Pine Tree, a theatrical work by Dara Weinberg in collaboration with MOVEIUS Contemporary Ballet. The work is a collage of poems and texts by Coleridge and Heine, set to free-jazz/electronic music and dance. Together with John Sullivan on 12-string guitar, I composed the vocal parts for three of Heine’s poems: The Lorelei, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam and Ritter Olaf. The music interludes for the latter piece came from a medieval tune by Adam de la Halle.

This collaboration made a big impression on me, as it was my first experience with the interdisciplinary possibilities at North American universities. The Lorelei, the Albatross and the Pine Tree was made possible by funding by the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center.

Pictures from the D.C. debut performance April 18, 2014 at the Montgomery Cultural Arts Center.

Photos Copyright 2014 Sasha Fornari

Directed by Danny Schwartz and Alexis Monroe

Music by Danny Schwartz, John Sullivan, Stephanie Koziej, and Phil Jenkins (including arrangements of 12th century French chanson)

Featuring Alexis Monroe, Dana Woodson, and Stephanie Koziej

Choreography by Olivia Sabee

Engineering by Aaron Smith and Josh Laskin