Crossroads Project will give encore
After receiving a great response from the USU community, an encore performance of this year’s Crossroads Project, presented at the request of the USU Honors Program, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night in the USU Performance Hall.
While the performance is free and open to the public on a first-come-first-serve basis, USU honor students are urged to attend, said Dr. Robert Davies, USU’s resident physicist.
“The performance features myself as science nerd and narrator and the Fry Street Quartet – USU’s own critically acclaimed professional string quartet in residence,” Davies said. “Also featured is Rising Tide, a quartet commissioned specifically for this project by the Fry Street Quartet and written by New York composer Laura Kaminsky.”
The Crossroads Project is an intersection of performance art and performance science addressing critically important issues of sustainability and climate change.
“It combines compelling information, compelling imagery and powerful music in live performance with the express intent of taking an audience from intellectual understanding… to visceral understanding… to meaningful response,” Davies said. “Many, many of us understand the criticality of the challenges we are facing, but few of us are behaving as though we understand.”
Davies called The Crossroads Project a collaboration of hard science and powerful art, hoping to help an audience feel the issues both meaningfully and viscerally, while at the same time knowing and understanding a visceral reaction is not simply “playing the emotion car” but based on hard science – mainstream science.
While last year’s Crossroads performance was conducted in the context of a much larger program – one held over the course of five weeks and comprised of five colloquia and three art exhibits – Davies said this year’s event will be much smaller; an encore presentation of the performance itself.
Since its first performance at USU in 2002, the Fry String Quartet has received acclaim for various performances and projects. According to violinist Rebecca McFaul, the group has drawn inspiration from the works of Beethoven since its formation in 1997.
In 2008, the quartet performed the “Beethoven Cycle” and played all 17 string quartets written by the composer in a two-week, six-concert series.
“I would say Beethoven’s work is sort of the cornerstone of the great repertoire of music that exists for the quartet,” McFaul said. “It transformed the quartet just for living through that. I mean, that much music all in the language of Beethoven, it was sort of life changing – and really hard.”
McFaul said the Crossroads Project debuted in fall 2012. It incorporates music with compelling, scientific information and imagery to inspire contemplation on the theme of humanity’s interaction with the planet.
“At its heart it is a communication project about sustainability,” McFaul said. “It is what the science is telling us and how we might feel and respond to it as artists.”
McFaul said the quartet originally came together with physicist Davies, supported by imagery from painters, photographers and sculptors. Together, they worked to depict their view of the harm society is inflicting on the planet.
“The idea is to look at the interconnectedness of all these earth systems, how they support life on our planet and how our relationship with those systems is critical to our own survival,” McFaul said. “It is a message that we feel really connected to and feel compelled to try to have a voice in.”