PRESS RELEASE — Resonance Ensemble Announces its 12th Season: "Normal Never Was"
For immediate release: September 16, 2020
Media Contact: Liz Bacon Brownson | liz@resonancechoral.org | 971.212.8034
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.
—Sonya Renee Taylor, award-winning performance poet, activist, and transformational leader
(reprinted with permission)
Resonance Ensemble announces its 12th season, “Normal Never Was,”
featuring bold new works by composers and poets responding to this
moment in ways that only art can reflect.
PORTLAND, OR — Normal Never Was, Resonance Ensemble’s imaginative 12th season, brims with performances that respond to the striking new challenges of the pandemic and to those that always were: racial and gender violence, inequality, and loss.
From an exciting new video series under Portland’s historic bridges, to three major world premieres commissioned by Resonance, to a groundbreaking collaboration across Oregon, Resonance creates visionary art with world-class composers and musicians.
“We were challenged this season to come up with ways to perform with our artists’ and audiences’ safety in the front of our minds,” says Resonance Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon. “We look forward to taking the stage once it’s safe to do so. Until then we offer other creative ways for our audiences to experience art that responds to the times, and we share these stories as we always do: through powerful new music written by innovative composers.”
UNDER THE OVERPASS Video Series
This series of videos celebrates Resonance’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, and the space it provides for Resonance artists to continue to create. Starting in the summer of 2020, singers and spoken word artists met in acoustic spaces around the city - six feet apart, masked, and yet together. Viewers will experience music performed in these gritty, hauntingly beautiful spaces. Resonance will produce four episodes beginning this October, free of charge and available for the whole world to enjoy.
COMMISSIONS FOR NOW Virtual World Premiere Series
Resonance has commissioned three dynamic composers to create new works in response to this moment, as we face a global pandemic and envision a world free of racial and gender violence. Resonance will create powerful video premieres and release them for free. The composers are:
Jasmine Barnes, a brilliant up-and-coming composer based in Dallas, whose multifaceted works frequently address questions of race and religion
Damien Geter, who will share two “sneak peek” excerpts from his forthcoming work An African American Requiem, a bold, thought-provoking musical response to racial violence against African Americans (presented jointly with the Oregon Symphony)
Mari Ésabel Valverde, an award-winning composer who is openly transgender, who is creating a new work with author/playwright Dane Figueroa. Titled We Hold Your Names Sacred, this work will share perspectives of trans women of color and reflect on losses due to gender violence
Coming in Spring 2021:
SIX FEET APART
In the face of loss, life continues.
As a global health crisis continues to rage across our world, our communities are facing unprecedented challenges. Resonance Ensemble partners with Ashland-based Anima Mundi Productions to offer this evocative world premiere in an innovative video presentation, coming in Spring 2021. Six Feet Apart harnesses the power of music and poetry to give voice to communities and foster collective healing in times of crisis. Since the beginning of the pandemic, composer Ethan Gans-Morse and poet Tiziana DellaRovere have worked to collect stories from around Oregon and to set the resulting stories of hope, travails, and triumphs to music. This work explores these stirring stories and brings them all together in an innovative video presentation with striking visuals by one of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's finest video designers.
We will announce the date of this virtual world premiere later this fall, with an opportunity for supporters to participate in a live Q&A with the creative team on its release date. The video, and an accompanying compilation of the pandemic stories, will thereafter be shared free of charge.
AN AFRICAN AMERICAN REQUIEM
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
Date to be announced
The eagerly-anticipated world premiere of An African American Requiem by Resonance’s Artistic Advisor Damien Geter
Oregon Symphony and Resonance Ensemble join forces to present the world premiere of An African American Requiem, Portland composer Damien Geter’s bold, thought-provoking musical response to violence against African Americans in the United States. Combining traditional Latin Requiem texts with civil rights declarations, poetry, and the famous last words of Eric Garner and now George Floyd, “I can’t breathe,” this performance will honor past and present victims of racial violence and spur reflection on how to build a more hopeful future.
Resonance and the Oregon Symphony will announce a newly rescheduled date shortly, for a time when our community can all come together in person, post-pandemic, to share this significant and necessary musical work. Our mailing lists will be the first to know.
About Resonance Ensemble
In its twelfth season, Resonance Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble based in Portland, Oregon, creates thoughtful programs that promote meaningful social change. Resonance Ensemble works to amplify voices that have long been silenced, and they do so through moving, thematic concerts that highlight solo and choral voices, new and underrepresented composers, visual and other performing artists, and community partners.
Under Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon, Resonance Ensemble has performed challenging and diverse music, always with an eye toward unusual collaborations with artistic partners from around the country: poets, jazz musicians, singer-songwriters, painters, dancers. The Resonance Ensemble singers are “one of the Northwest’s finest choirs” (Willamette Week), with gorgeous vocal tone, and they also make music with heart.
The groundbreaking work that Resonance Ensemble has been producing over the last few years has been noted by local media and national arts organizations. In Oregon Arts Watch, Matthew Andrews described Resonance as “Part social commentary, part group therapy, and part best damn choir show in town." (June 2019) Chorus America honored Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon in the summer of 2019 with the Louis Botto Award for Innovative Action and Entrepreneurial Zeal for her work rededicating Resonance to promoting meaningful social change, and for the meaningful community partnerships she creates. For the tribute to Dr. FitzGibbon, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJMVozrcPo.
#NormalNeverWas
#Resonance2021
About Dr. Katherine FitzGibbon
About Artistic Advisor and composer Damien Geter
About composer Jasmine Barnes
About composer Mari Ésabel Valverde
About Anima Mundi Productions