Morning Light
The New York Choral Society presents Morning Light, a multidisciplinary digital performance of composer Kevin Siegfried’s arrangement for a capella chorus of the Shaker song Morning Light in collaboration with choreographer David Hamilton Thomson.
Kevin Siegfried notes: “2020 has been a year of unparalleled challenges. Individuals, families, communities of all kinds have had to dig deep to find the inner resources to meet the challenges of each day. Flexibility, strength, resilience, innovation, compassion and care for one another have been at the center of our lives. For choral communities, the connecting practice of singing together has been put on hold, and choirs have born patiently an endless stream of postponements, cancellations, and questions with no easy answers…. Based on an anonymous Shaker song, ‘Morning Light’ signifies hope and embodies a promise – the light will return.”
David Hamilton Thomson explores the intersections of movement, text, sound and song. His collaborative interdisciplinary practice focuses on questions of presence, identity and the unconscious narratives that drive us. He creates performance installations in a range of temporal forms and mediums from short works to durational tasks. Recent projects center on the interrogation of presence and absence: what it means to be present, to be seen, and to see; if being present is a performance in itself; how does absence become a presence; how does one give space for absence as performance?
Morning Light, a featured production of The New York Choral Society’s Our Voices series, premieres Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 8pm.