Coming up for The Drunkard’s Wife
July, 2024
All Trees a
re Hardest to Feel Terrible
All Trees are Hardest to Feel Terrible is an experimental opera about opera, the horrors of nostalgia and the pleasures of the handmade. It is scored for classical voices and strings as well as generative electronic music from modular and custom built synthesizers.
Look out for a work in progress showing at the end of September, 2024!
August, 2023
PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE
Tired of dissociating? Try PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE!
coming to HERE (145 6th Ave, NYC) September 12-30, 2023
developed as a part of HERE’S HARP and Dream Music Puppetry residency programs.
The abstract, hallucinatory world of PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE —simultaneously a séance, a sculpture, and a live action screen saver—creates a space for you to recalibrate your attention. Psychic Self Defense invites you to experience mystery and mental spaciousness by way of that most basic of theatrical machineries—the curtain reveal.
Psychic Self Defense takes Dion Fortune’s 1930 occult self-help text of the same name as point of departure. Fortune’s book is about how we protect ourselves from paranormal psychic attacks from beings such as vampires and ghosts. This evening-length performance attempts to create new psychic self defense strategies for an era where capitalism incentivizes and normalizes the hijacking of our attention– via smartphones, apps, screens in all public spaces. How do we regain a sense of mental spaciousness? Psychic Self Defense aims to create this experience of empty space by way of the hypnotic effect of at least 45 minutes of curtains opening. The piece will explore visual and sonic abstraction, and will rely on theatrical machinery, puppetry techniques, lights, shadows, a sound score that features samples and generative electronics, movement based performance, talking, negative space and positive energy.
Psychic Self Defense is performed by Ean Sheehy, Nikki Calonge, Daniel Allen Nelson, Kate Brehm, Adrienne Swan, and Elyse Durand with musicians Craig Flanagin and Normandy Sherwood.
Psychic Self Defense is created, written, designed, and directed by Normandy Sherwood. It features composition and sound design by Craig Flanagin, scenic and rigging design by Daniel Allen Nelson, curtain and costume design and construction by Normandy Sherwood, and lighting design by Christina Tang. The creative team includes production manager Daniel Allen Nelson, sound engineer Travis Wright, and line producer Caitlin Adams. Conceptual collaborators include Craig Flanagin, Daniel Allen Nelson, Christina Tang, Nikki Calonge, and Ean Sheehy.