“We don’t need the sea to drown, we are drowning right here”- said by a refugee amidst flooding on Nauru Island detention center outside Sydney Australia. His words were recounted to Karol in a movement interview with Amnesty International liaison in her research for The Gauntlet: Sydney Opera House, 2017.
"I am thrilled to be presenting this work with Coco Karol and this group of amazing singers. Both Coco and I have a unique and very individualized vision for our art, when bring those visions together we create something neither of us could create on our own." -Sxip
We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown is a multi-disciplinary performance from Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol that combines stories gleaned from Karol’s movement interview with NY-based artists and community leaders with Shirey’s renowned use of sound objects with the duo’s celebrated choral form, the Gauntlet, where corridors of singers pass a libretto downstream in cascadinging tones and phrases, as audiences experience waves of sound.
These techniques for We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown immerse audiences in personal narratives, ancestral histories, and ecological memories. Additionally, performances will contain a composition for dance, voice, tuned glass and objects, including drip irrigation bags that Shirey and Karol manipulate to create phasing polyrhythms by dripping water onto tonal metal bowls.
// This presentation is commissioned by National Sawdust, with the generous support of the Eric and Barbara Carle Foundation.
Archival Film and Documentary by Jacob McCoy
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