OFFERING, 2022
Interactive Performance and Public Song Circle, TRT: 30:00, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
OFFERING is a public song circle designed to gather and contend with grief both individually and collectively. The interactive performance offers a moment for commemoration, listening, and participation in singing together. Specifically created for the Sound Scene Festival at the Hirshhorn Museum, OFFERING was organized in-collaboration with the Threshold Singers of Washington D.C., a community of people continuing the ancient tradition of bedside singing to the dying.
Offering, 2020
Online Video Work, TRT: 5:15
In 2020, I created Offering, a short video work for the online exhibition program at BRIC (Brooklyn). While we are separated from one another, unable to access the grieving traditions normally practiced, this piece is an offering to access and contend with both our personal and collective loss. Research has shown that music, particularly during the bereavement process, is deeply nourishing and can stimulate greater depth, meaning and connection as we mourn, providing subtle yet profoundly healing shifts in awareness. This video work requests not only reception, but participation, to allow access to emotions, memories, and meditation, while igniting empathy for others’ losses.
The Threshold Choir repertoire draws from many cultures, including mantras from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Hebrew songs, and melodies that sound like Gregorian chants, but most bedside songs are written by choir members themselves. Created for three or four voices, the songs tend to be spiritual without being religious. They also are not meant to be performed; rather, they are to be encountered organically in an intimate, personal place, where soft melodies offer space for reflection and remembrance.
Grief is a universal human experience, and expression of it through wailing and song have always been a sacred part of honoring and remembering the dead. Oral rituals of outward mourning were once a responsibility that often fell to women. Offering/OFFERING continues in that tradition, allowing viewers to contend with the subject of loss in a generative and meaningful way, as well as to practice listening, and to meditate on individual or collective experiences of loss.