AUDIO excerpts (InfraSound premiere):

Iconic Program Note:

Our human stories are full of heroes and iconic figures. We adore them, then, often we discard them. Who are these icons? Humans who dare to be “god-like”? Mythology warns us of the consequences for such hubris.

Imagine two iconic characters emerging from the piles of our refuse:
-Leander, who dared to love someone his society had forbidden
(Hero, who would light a lamp guiding him as he swam across the channel to her).
- Medusa, known as the snake-haired monster
(a curse as punishment for her god-provoking beauty)

These two iconic figures are joined by their intersections with Neptune, god of the Sea,
who “took” them both, asserting his superiority.

The texts intersect abstractly. The singers may be the characters, or they may imagine that they are... the piece is about discarding our heroes, our icons, about our wastefulness.

Neptune, the sea, is represented scenically (or in the short Prologue film created by H. Paul Moon) by two waves frozen as if so full of trash that they can no longer move. Two icons (Leander and Hero) are suspended in pieces, like life-sized broken toys in the crests of the immobile waves. Their “spirits” step out of the sea to share their stories. The ensemble is the voice of Neptune, and of the birds (alcyons and crows), and of the environment - a chorus. The two icons are transformed - in voice, in beauty, beyond their bodies, transcending their corporal and mythic selves.

Imagine Leander and Medusa, stepping out from the piles we have discarded,
giving voice to their stories, freeing their souls like halcyon birds or crows.

-Susan Botti

Prologue
1.     This Body (Joyce Sutphen)
2.     How dare I swim? (Leander)
3.     How dare I bear such beauty? (Medusa)
Epilogue (Of My Body) (Yaccaira Salvatierra)