Jaguar Harmonics: A Collaborative Performance, Douglas Dunn Salon, New York, NY
Saturday March 14, 8 pm
Sunday March 15, 3 pm
At the Douglas Dunn Salon
541 Broadway, NYC
Text and vocals: Anne Waldman
Musicians: Daniel Carter, Ha-Yang Kim, Devin Brahja Waldman, Ambrose Bye
Choreography: Douglas Dunn
Images: Kiki Smith
In Anne Waldman’s Jaguar Harmonics, the voice of the Ayahuasca vine, a “person woven of sound” speaks to the poet and us: “now you are quick, soon you will be dead”; “you can’t just go around killing and conquering persons.” And the poet asks herself, can we hear the “mammal stealth” of these warnings? Her listening creates a tesserae of sound and language for “poetry, to blink you awake.” A masterful web that compels us to “put away the scriptures of doom” and “breathe in this world this time of cosmic night.” —Cecila Vicuna
“Here word and music combine to birth a brilliantly contemporary genre that straddles storytelling, opera, and a general free jazz kind of sound… Individual instruments express themselves with collaborative purpose. As a whole, the music creates an excellent atmospheric backdrop for the narrative, never crowding the recitation, rather supplementing, expanding it and drawing pictures for the mind. As such, the music is interpretational only in the positive sense that it enriches the word with wider expressive possibilities. At the album’s best, poetry is music, performative, rhythmic; music is poetry, a language in pure sound.”—echo!, Klara Du Plessis on Jaguar Harmonics