Sxip Shirey's Hour of Charm: Mother Tree Prayers, with Nilusha Dassenaike’s 10 Blessings at Nati
As part of vocalist Nilusha Dassenaike's 10 Blessings vocal ensemble, Luisa will join her colleagues at this very special event!
Sxip’s Hour of Charm is iconoclastic composer, performer, and producer Sxip Shirey’s ongoing art variety show, now in its 17th year. Part of the lineage of art cabaret in New York City that began with punk cabaret and Klaus Nomi, this installment features:
–Mother Tree Prayer by Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol with Rima Fand, Nilusha Dassenaike, and Thelonious Karol Shirey. Based on The Gauntlet: Sydney Opera House, a song about drought.
-Nilusha Dassenaike’s 10 Blessings (vocal ensemble with electronics)
-Aimee Curl singing Baby Dee’s “The Robin’s Tiny Throat.”
-Sarah Alden performing an excerpt with string quartet from her new work Mother Pearl, based on the letters her grandmother in Ohio sent to other farm women who moved to industrial cities like Gary, Indiana.
-Rima Fand performing an excerpt from the new opera “Precipice” with singer Alice Tolan-Mee.
–Precipice, an object-theater piece/chamber opera from visual artist Susan Zeeman Rogers, librettist Karen Fisher, and composer Rima Fand. Presented as a dream-like contemporary fairy tale, Precipice follows a girl with a wild spirit as she grows up in the rigidity of 1950’s America, loses her sense of self, and rediscovers her power through her relationship to the natural world.
-Laura Serna (from Shirey’s FIRST band IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN from Athens, Ohio!) singing a Mexican Lament and the beautiful and painful “Brownie’s Misfortune.”
-Original compositions by Sxip Shirey and an ending JANK! with tuba player Johan Alterie, drummer Attis Clopton, and singer Xavier.
