Description
How does an idea form?
How do we pay attention to ideas that show up and want to be developed?
How do we use what we already know to improvise and create something new?
For the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s landmark book Origin of Species, I was part of a multi-media performance celebration designed by Carol Burch Brown, professor at the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. For 24 hours, we sang improvised music and read from The Book, in an evocative environment that included a 14 million year old whale skull from the Virginia Museum of Natural History, projected images from Darwin’s and Burch Brown’s voyages in the Galapagos and Darwin’s home in England, and hundreds of pages of The Book hung as curtains leading us to a new idea. This is the piece that “evolved” from that experiment.
