Collaborative performances by OSSIA New Music, the student-run new music organization at the Eastman School of Music, and BIODANCE, a contemporary dance company based in Rochester, will examine the topic of climate change and the merging of technology and nature. Using movement, music, and interactive technology, the performances on August 23 and 24, both at 6 p.m. at the Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC), will put audiences in the center of the performance.
OSSIA New Music and BIODANCE perform together at the University of Rochester. Photo provided by Missy Pfohl Smith.
Audiences will wander the grounds of RMSC to hear site-specific performances in the program called “Wander and Wonder III,” denoting the third year of this collaboration between the two organizations. Through a motion-activated phone app designed by Logan Barrett, OSSIA’s president and a doctoral student in composition at Eastman, both dancers and audiences will be able to influence the composition, which includes recorded nature sounds of local Rochester birds and from the site itself. The app plays back interactive sounds on audience members’ phones.
“The work considers ways in which nature and technology both interact and conflict, and how humans impact nature and the environment,” says Missy Pfohl Smith, Director of BIODANCE Company and Director of the Dance and Movement Program at the University of Rochester.
Along with Barrett, OSSIA musicians Austin White, Artur Korotin, Tucker Johnson, and Floris Van der Veken will engage in improvised dialogue with the dancers. BIODANCE forces include Ethan Beckwith-Cohen, Zaire Sprowal, Neyda Colón-DiMaria, Luis Carrión, Donna Davenport, Michelle Ikle, Natalia Lisina, Laurie McFarlane, Nanako Horikawa Mandrino, Claire Spenard, Roy Marshall, Harold Taddy and The Velvet Noose, Grace Myers, Evan Courtney, Gabrielle Samuel, Sabrina Bui, and Amya Brice.
Admission is free with a suggested $10 donation. Forty percent of donations will go to the Men of Color Health Awareness Project (MOCHA), a non-profit that promotes LGBTQ+ Health and Wellness for communities of color in New York State. To register for the event and make a donation, click here.
“Wander and Wonder” will also get a reprise at the Rochester Fringe Festival on Saturday, September 23 at 1 p.m. This program is free and open to the public and marks the fourth overall collaboration between BIODANCE and OSSIA.
-By Mason St. Pierre