FERUS Festival: Sarah Hennies & Mara Baldwin "Come ‘Round Right"
featuring Anna Roberts-Gevalt
6pm doors • 7pm show
About
Composer Sarah Hennies draws “vividly atmospheric shapes” that “[test] conventional notions of musical narrative” (Pitchfork). Hennies and visual artist Mara Baldwin join forces for Come ‘Round Right, a work combining music and sculpture inspired by Shaker hymns and crafts, cultural residues of a once-thriving community that has dwindled to just two members. Featuring Anna Roberts-Gevalt of Appalachian folk duo Anna & Elizabeth — praised by the New Yorker for their “tight and beautiful” harmonies and their “musicological investigations of place” — Come ‘Round Right concerns itself with labor, identity, survival, love, and the passage of time.
Sarah Hennies and Mara Baldwin are joined after the show by Steve Smith, National Sawdust’s Director of Publications, for a conversation about the piece.
Running time: one hour
Tickets
The Artists
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of small chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), The OBEY Convention (Halifax), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Cristian Alvear, Claire Chase, R. Andrew Lee (Denver), LIMINAR, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Mara Baldwin (b. 1984, Iowa City, IA) received her MFA from the California College of the Arts (2010) and her BFA from Wesleyan University (2006). Her work has shown at Rosefsky Gallery (Binghamton University), Davis Gallery (Hobart & William Smith), String Room Gallery (Wells College), Johnson Art Museum (Cornell University), Facebook Manhattan, PLAySPACE, the San Francisco Arts Commission, SOMArts, UC Berkeley, Triple Base Gallery, Root Division, and Capricious/Company Gallery. Her accolades include the Murphy Cadogan Award, an SFMoMA SECA nomination, and residencies with the Millay Colony, Ucross Foundation, Saltonstall Foundation, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She lives and works in Ithaca, New York and is director of the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College.
