Mushroom Music

The Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N) gets a steady stream of odd, interesting, experimental performances by local artists, thanks to the Wayward Music Series.

Every once in a while, one performance comes along that sounds so striking that I want to write about it, but I’m just at a loss for words. This is one them. Here it is:

SKINESPHERES
MUSIC of the PLANTS & other earthly dances
Live Music Soundscape by Rocco Strain / Eco-Sensuous Costume Design by Shelby Mae / Choreography by  Iván Espinosa
Thursday, April 4th 7:30 PM
Chapel Performance Space @ The Good Shepherd Center
$20 general admission / $15 students
Includes complimentary snacks and herbal+mushroom teas

Through a striking integration of experimental dance and Live electro-acoustic music featuring BIO-SONIFICATION soundwaves of plants, moss, fungi and lichens, SKINESPHERES is a meditation on the sensuous, somatic affinity that entangles our body with the bodies of More-Than-Human beings, binding our sentience with that of the living Earth.  In a culture which views the BODY as a mechanism to be trained and the EARTH as a resource to be exploited, how can we begin to experience once again their fundamental wholeness and interconnection? 

Inviting the audience to contemplate the connection(s) between SENSORIUM, ECOSYSTEM, THE BODY AND THE EARTH, the performance will take dancers and audience on a journey through the gorgeous stained-glass-window-covered Chapel and the outdoor garden of the historic Good Shepherd Center in Seattle, emphasizing the organic connections between body, senses, ecology, art and their environment(s).

THE LIVE MUSIC will feature living, breathing plants, trees, lichen, fungi, and mycelium fungal networks participating in the transmission by being connected to motion sensors that create SOUND from the bio-electricity pulsing from the surface of the plant/fungi to the roots of the organism.  Musician and SOUND ARTIST Rocco Strain will utilize miniature contact microphones to amplify audio VIBRATIONS produced by physical contact with the flesh and skin of LIVING, BREATHING PLANT AND FUNGAL ORGANISMS.  This eco-sensuous soundscape invites human bodies to COMMUNE commune with leaf-bearing botanical bodies, emissaries of the Earth connected to a subterranean civilization older than time.

In this time-bending, heightened experience of space and sound, the dancers melt into worlds beyond their own… realms in which human beings can exchange possibilities with every cap and stem, with each textured surface and vibrating entity that emanate songs from the worlds of soil and stone.

There. I want to write something clever, but I can’t even. I just can’t.