ANIMA presents : The Sign of Jonas; An Apocalypse Folktale by Luke Hathaway & Benton Roark

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March 20 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Pay What You Can

ANIMA Early Music is thrilled to present The Sign of Jonas; An Apocalypse Folktale, with texts by Luke Hathaway & music by Benton Roark. This (55-minute) work will be performed by Mother Country, a beautiful roots music ensemble led by Benton Roark (voice, banjo, guitar & piano) and featuring Andrew Ivens (voice, mandolin, guitar, piano & lap steel), Phil Albert (voice & bass) & Chris Hull (percussion). Mother Country will be joined by ANIMA’s artist co-directors, Daniel Cabena (voice & fiddle) & Luke Hathaway (spoken word).

Here are a few notes about this work from composer Benton Roark:

Sparse in construction, timeless in imagery, arcane in meaning, and proto-mythical in characters and narrative, The Sign of Jonas superimposes personal apocalypse on environmental and cultural collapse. It imagines a song cycle lost and found: a musical manuscript orphaned by the cataclysms of the 21st century, and rewakened to ritual life far in the future. The fragmentary text speaks of travelling, of death and rebirth, of decay and regeneration; the music is a ritualized series of part songs, responsorials, chants, chorales, and incantations, performed as a folk-music-pageant-mystery-play, complete with communal singing and other forms of audience participation. When our lives end, they continue in one another.

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