The Wood is Singing in Color

The Wood is Singing in Color
Wharton Esherick Museum—Malvern, PA
November 13, 2023

Music in collaboration with Brooke Sietinsons and Miriam Goldberg

Costumes in collaboration with Dana Meyer
Sets by Casey Chew

The Wood is Singing in Color was a site-specific performance that explored Wharton Esherick’s creative influences in the 1920s and 30s, including Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical design theories which sought to express unseen spiritual energies through form and color and often featured crystalline shapes. The environment and costumes for the performance, made in collaboration with woodworker Casey Chew and fashion designer Dana Meyer, were inspired by Esherick’s prismatic furniture and stage sets.

Esherick was also an amateur dancer who practiced a dance form based on Eurythmy, a performance form Steiner created to make music visible through movement with colored veils. I studied Eurythmy to create a dance for the piece. The performance featured original music I wrote with Brooke Sietinsons and Miriam Goldberg, who performed with me. My lyrics were drawn from Esherick’s personal writings. Some songs were inspired by the ecstatic spiritualism of 19th century shape note singing while others conjure the unseen energies in nature with which Esherick and Steiner were so deeply in tune.

The piece was commissioned by Wharton Esherick Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. It was staged in the 1956 workshop Esherick designed with architects Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng.

Photos by Ryan Collerd
Audio and video by C. A. Studios

Learn about the process of making this piece on the Wharton Esherick Museum website

Photo and Video by Brooke Sietinsons.