We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown is a multi-disciplinary performance from Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol that combines stories gleaned from Karol’s movement interview with Brooklyn-based artists and community leaders with Shirey’s renowned use of sound objects with the duo’s celebrated choral form, the Gauntlet, where corridors of singers pass a libretto downstream in cascadinging tones and phrases, as audiences experience waves of sound.
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“We don’t need the sea to drown, we are drowning right here”- said by a refugee amidst flooding on Nauru Island detention center outside Sydney Australia. His words were recounted to Karol in a movement interview with Amnesty International liaison in her research for The Gauntlet: Sydney Opera House, 2017.
These techniques for We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown immerse audiences in personal narratives, ancestral histories, and ecological memories. Additionally, performances will contain a composition for dance, voice, tuned glass and objects, including drip irrigation bags that Shirey and Karol manipulate to create phasing polyrhythms by dripping water onto tonal metal bowls.
// This presentation is commissioned by National Sawdust, with the generous support of the Eric and Barbara Carle Foundation.
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Created by Coco Karol and Sxip Shirey
Archival Film and Documentary by Jacob McCoy
Performed by Sxip Shirey, Coco Karol, Jonny Rodgers, Rima Fand, Catherine Brookman, Miguel Guzman, Priya Darshini, Nathan Repaz, Onome, Lacy Rose and more to be announced!
Coco Karol is a dancer/ choreographer/ educator who creates cross-disciplinary performance works concerned with meaning-making and embodied memory. She uses dance as a form of ethnography, and developed a methodology to interview people while moving with them. Karol holds a BFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts (2005) and an MFA from Hollins University (2015). She has had an expansive dance career in New York, dancing for Misnomer Dance Theater, Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance Company, and Christopher Williams, as well as being a part of projects by Bill Young, Jose Navas, and Steven Petronio. She has choreographed works for stage, film, theater, and public space and has collaborated with notable visual artists and musicians, getting to work with artists such as Bjork, Amanda Palmer, Steven Sebring, Zoe Keating, C. Finley, SWOON, Sxip Shirey and others. Her own works have been shown at the Sydney Opera House, NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, National Sawdust, BAX, Ibeam, Spectrum, D.U.M.B.O Under the Bridge Arts Festival, Triskelion, Galapagos, Death By Audio, and curated by AUNTS. Karol teaches embodied-inquiry movement practices, technique classes in contemporary forms, and MUNZ® FLOOR, a somatic spinal health method and GYROTONIC®. She has taught workshops at universities including Tisch NYU, Norwegian Theater Academy, and Ohio University. Karol is fiscally sponsored by The Field. She started Red Sole Productions, LLC in 2011. (findingcoco.net)
Sxip Shirey is a composer and sound artist based in New York City. He is the composer and music director for the circus arts production LIMBO, produced by Melbourne based Strut N Fret Productions House and London based, Underbelly and South Bank Center. LIMBO has toured internationally since 2015, including seasons at Sydney Opera House, London’s Southbank Center, the Bogota International Theater Festival, Munich’s Tollwood Festival and an appearance at Madonna’s 57th Birthday Day party. Shirey teaches workshops in "Text and Object Oriented Composition" at Norwegian Theater Academy in Fredrickstad which he considers the Black Mountain College of NOW. Shirey's ongoing immersive choral works, The Gauntlet, developed with his artistic partner Coco Karol, have been performed at Rockefeller Center, The Sydney Opera House, Bard College and for the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a collaborator of singer and song composer Rhiannon Giddens; released tracks include, “All Babies Must Cry” and “Woman of Constant Sorrow.” Shirey has presented at TED (2008), is a United States Artist Fellow (2011) and has been artist curator (2016) and artist in residence (2017) at National Sawdust, Brooklyn. Shirey composed for the short Neil Gaiman film "Statuesque" which premiered on Christmas Day on SKY TV, UK (2009). Other compositional highlights include composition for choreographer Dan Safer’s The One You Feed (2019) at M.I.T., and music for Little Amal’s visit with the artist Swoon’s Sibilant Sisters (2022) presented by Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Shirey co-composed the music for No One Is Forgotten based on a play written by Winter Miller that was released on Lexicon Classics records in 2023. Shirey produced the electronic tracks and did sound design on Paola Prestini’s Old Man and the Sea opera and upcoming Sensorium Ex, a muti-modal opera, operating at the intersection of AI, disability, and the arts. (sxipshireymusic.com)
Jacob McCoy is a Brooklyn, New York-based filmmaker and multimedia artist. With formative years spent supporting artists such as Lou Reed and Years and Years both on tour and in the studio, Jacob naturally transitioned into visual storytelling. He passionately supports fellow artists with his technical whimsy and strategic creative direction. Fluent in documentary, music video, and live visuals, Jacob elevates music and performing arts through his work, which has been commissioned by prestigious venues and organizations like the Sydney Opera House, Bard College, and Phoenix Chorale.