Ghost Ship of State: A Performance

December 2, 2017, 7pm
 

Ghost Ship of State: A Performance  is a collaboration between writer Joan Harvey and visual artist Natascha Seideneck. The poem, written by Harvey, responds to the dual shock of the 2016 elections and the fire three weeks later at the Ghost Ship, an artist collective in a converted Oakland warehouse that killed 36 young people. To Harvey, these events seemed to portend the onset of a national trauma, an insight that was all too prescient. Musical realization by Farrell Lowe and Dave Willey and sung by Elena Camerin Young and Tom Weiser in a performance that celebrates and mourns the innocent lives lost in the Ghost Ship fire while grieving the current tragedy confronting the nation. 

Reception to follow with a performance by punk rock band Rocket Dust.

$10 suggested donation

About the Creators

JOAN HARVEY
Joan Harvey’s fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in dozens of literary journals, and she has won awards for both poetry and fiction.  Stories of hers have been translated into Romanian and Japanese.  She is on the board of a foundation that focuses on the environment, nuclear policy, and reproductive and civil rights.  

FARRELL LOWE
Farrell Lowe grew up as a farmer in the Ohio River Valley region (aka the middle of nowhere) and began playing the trumpet in the third grade and the guitar when he was 15 and has been playing that instrument ever since. Farrell’s work is about the ephemeral nature of being and the limits of human understanding. His work is about our conception of time, the natural world, our constructed world, and the intersections that occur during the exploration of Self through conscious and unconscious channels. For him, this work is about developing maps that reference time, place, impermanence, and mortality. His work is rooted in the fertile ground of his experiences of living in rural America, and often have curious, personal references to that now distant life. It is not a direct reference to that experience, it is free from context, connected to the past and present, but fictional. There is no reference to a tangible reality. This work speaks to our internal reality. They are numinous signposts. They serve as a reminder of how large our world can be.

ligeiamare.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/farrell-lowe

NATASHA SEIDENECK
Natascha Seideneck was born in Germany, grew up in England and now lives in Denver, Colorado. She has a MFA from School for the Museum of Fine Arts. Natascha has exhibited her artwork extensively and produced numerous site specific artworks often collaborating with artists, designers, and architects. Currently she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver and a member of Tank Studios.

TOM WEISER
Tom Weiser is a improviser and jazz vocalist who currently performs with his own jazz quartet (called, coincidentally, the Tom Weiser Jazz Quartet) and with Vox Libera, an a capella quartet also featuring Elena Camerin Young.  Tom grew up in a large family and figured out at an early age that singing harmony was much more interesting than singing melody.  And it’s not so crowded.This thinking still informs his musical choices.

DAVE WILLEY
electronics

ELENA CAMERIN YOUNG
Born in Venice, Italy, Elena Camerin Young is very active as a singer and a composer, working with several groups and with her own projects in clubs and theaters in Italy and U.S.A. In July 2004 she won the Best Student Award at the Michele Hendricks' Vocal Jazz Workshop in Spoleto, with the Spoleto Arts Symposia; she lived in NYC from 2008 to 2015 where she soon became part of the underground jazz scene. Nowadays she lives in Boulder, CO where she sings regularly with her own projects and other bands.      

http://elena1camerin.wixsite.com/elenacamerinyoung

ROCKET DUST
Monica Ward, Dan and Kelly Merrick