Walker Art Center and SPCO's Liquid Music Series Present the World Premiere of Commissioned Music/Theater work In Your Mouth by Ted Hearne, with Real Time Installation by Conceptual Artist Rachel Perry and Stage Direction by Daniel Fish
“One of the brightest compositional talents of the millennial generation.” – Russell Platt, The New Yorker
The lush, stingingly true poetry of Dorothea Lasky has inspired composer Ted Hearne‘s new theatrical song cycle, igniting hearts and minds with ferocity and grace. With frank observations of the everyday intertwined with revelatory maneuverings of his own voice, Hearne’s music—a smart mélange of traditional and contemporary tonalities with an accessible pop sheen—is backed by a quintet of in-demand musicians. This intimate 12-song suite engages audiences in a complicated, loving meditation on the personal and domestic, while savoring the depths of the wildness within. Intensifying the performance is real-time installation by conceptual artist Rachel Perry (shown above: Perry’s Blue Falling, 2019) and stage direction by Daniel Fish.
“What began as a personal, visceral connection to the stark and emotional poetry of Dorothea Lasky turned into a set of songs that explores wildness within the eye of the beholder,” says Hearne. “I’m so excited and grateful to be working with the brilliant Rachel Perry and Daniel Fish, who with their perspectives each bring incredible rigor and beauty to this project. Working with the Walker as a commissioning and presenting partner is a dream come true and I’m honored to participate in their rich programming.”
Co-commissioned and copresented by the SPCO’s Liquid Music Series and the Walker Art Center.
The world premiere performances take place Thursday, November 21 and Friday, November 22 at 8pm in the Walker’s McGuire Theater. Tickets are $26 ($20.80 Walker members).
Related Event
Pre-performance Reading by Dorothea Lasky
Thursday, November 21, 7–7:30 pm
Cityview Bar, outside the McGuire Theater
ABOUT TED HEARNE
Composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist Ted Hearne (b.1982, Chicago) draws on a wide breadth of influences ranging across music’s full terrain, to create intense, personal and multi-dimensional works. The New York Times has praised Mr. Hearne for his “tough edge and wildness of spirit,” and “topical, politically sharp-edged works.” Pitchfork called Hearne’s work “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre,” and Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Hearne’s music “holds up as a complex mirror image of an information-saturated, mass-surveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact.” Hearne’s album Sound From the Bench, a cantata for choir, electric guitars and drums setting texts from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments and inspired by the idea of corporate personhood, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Ted Hearne’s latest release and first album of solo and chamber works, Hazy Heart Pump, is now available on New Focus Recordings.
ABOUT RACHEL PERRY
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Rachel Perry’s work is held in numerous museums and private collections around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Perry has received four Fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, has been to Yaddo and ArtOmi, and was Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in October of 2014, beginning an affiliation that continues today. She is a three-time recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Excellence, the only artist in its history to win in three separate disciplines: Photography, Drawing, and Sculpture. Perry was a Finalist for the Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2006.
ABOUT DOROTHEA LASKY
Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published five collections of poetry including AWE (2007), and Black Life (2010), and Thunderbird (2012), as well as one book of prose. Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent publications, including the New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Known for her colloquial, even slangy style and dramatic readings, Lasky acknowledges that “there is a kind of arrogance, a kind of supreme power, that when infused with a little real humility and expertise, makes a poem. Because the poem is always about the speaker.” Lasky was awarded a Bagley Wright Fellowship in 2013, and she is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University.
ABOUT DANIEL FISH
Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays and found audio. His recent work includes WHITE NOISE, inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo ( Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen), Michael Gordon’s opera, ACQUANETTA (Prototype Festival), Don’t Look Back (The Chocolate Factory), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Center), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM NEXT WAVE, L.A Opera, San Francisco Opera), Oklahoma! (Bard Summerscape), and ETERNAL. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies and has taught at The Juilliard School, Bard College, Princeton University, and the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater.