LIGHTNING AT OUT FEET, (2008)

Michael Gordon - Ridge Theater
Lightning at our Feet

Text by Emily Dickinson
Music composed by Michael Gordon
Films by Bill Morrison
Projections by Laurie Olinder
Dramaturgy by Daniel Zippi
Directed by Bob McGrath

Musical arrangements by Michael Gordon in collaboration with Jennifer Charles, Leah Coloff, Ted Hearne, Courtney Orlando, & Bora Yoon
Set Design by Jim Findlay
Costume design by Ruth Pongstaphone
Lighting design by John Ambrosone

With:
Jennifer Charles
Leah Coloff
Courtney Orlando
Bora Yoon
Commissioned by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and BAM for the 2008 Next Wave Festival.

Lightning at our feet was first work shopped at Virginia Tech, April 2008.
Produced by Kenny Savelson
Presented by arrangement with Lisa Booth Management, Inc.
Sarah Ford, Production Stage Manager/Company Manager
Ted Hearne, Music Director
Austin Switzer, Video Supervisor
Jamie McElhinney, Sound Supervisor
Julia Koch, Movement Consultant

Emily Dickinson discovered entire worlds within her imagination. Discerning the gears of the cosmos in the everyday, Dickinson created a new landscape of the interior in writings rich with wonder and fierce with longing. It's an intriguing duality that forms the heart of Lightning at our feet, a multimedia song cycle inspired by the poems of Dickinson from composer Michael Gordon and Ridge Theater—the creative team behind Decasia (2001). Setting her poems to music and motion, Gordon and Ridge create an environment of restless creativity; transformed by Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder's projections, rolling screens form rooms onstage both real and metaphoric.

Under Bob McGrath's direction with dramaturgy by Daniel Zippi, four contemporary women channel the poet as they pore over poems, write songs, and contemplate mortality, while receiving dispatches from a distant war. Together, these collaborators create a theatrical prose poem that re-imagines Dickinson's words as songs for our time.

Commissioned by Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and BAM for the 2008 Next Wave Festival. Originally workshopped at Virginia Tech.

New York Times Review:
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Go back to History Page

• SHELTER, (2005-present)
• CARBON COPY BUILDING, (1999-present)
• DECASIA LIVE, (2001-present)
• LIGHTNING AT OUR FEET, (2008)
• HENRYK GÓRECKI
• THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC
• THE DIFFICULTY OF CROSSING A FIELD, (2006)
• HARRY PARTCH’S ‘OEDIPUS’, (2005)
• GOTHAM, (2004-present)
• JENNIE RICHEE, (2001-2004)
• THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, (2003)
• HYPATIA, (2000)
• CHARLIE IN THE HOUSE OF RUE, (1999)
• CHAOS, (1998)
• THE SANDLEWOOD BOX & THE DAMNED THING, (1998)
• ALICE IN BED, (1996)