Saturday November 4 * 1:30pm * TICKETS
“SPIRIT-RIDER & NIGHT-HEART” is a performance of shadow puppetry and song, set to Georgia Beatty’s album “Apprentice to Transformation” with Maisie O’Brien using overhead projector & cut paper shadow puppets. It tells the story of Spirit-Rider, a lost horse rider chasing a mystical drum in search of their heartbeat. What happens when grand sky ancestor Night-Heart intervenes? There’s only one way to find out…
Opening performance by Melissa Hyatt Foss.
Georgia Beatty is a songwriter and fiddler, focused on cycle, lineage, and healing through cultural transmission. Her first full-length album, Apprentice to Transformation, (self-released Oct 2022) is a collection of original and traditional fiddle tunes devoted to the practice of witnessing Death as a moment in cycle, rather than the end. Georgia's study as a fiddler is in Norwegian traditional music. She's had the honour of performing and teaching at Dartmouth College, dusty punk clubs, the Zlante Uste Goldenfest, and elementary school classrooms. Her work is based in one of the great wisdoms that joy is what we feel when we are in connection with other living beings. The stories told in Georgia's music come from a faith that our liberation will be embodied and communal.
Maisie O’Brien (she/they) is a Philadelphia transplant from Dallas, TX and a Chinese-American adoptee. She has had the pleasure of presenting her original work with communities including Great Small Works, National Capital Puppetry Guild, Nasty Brutish & Short, Puppet Showplace Theater, Black Cherry Puppet Theater, The Baltimore Crankie Festival, Asian Arts Initiative, and Vox Populi Gallery, as well as developing shadows, puppets, sets, and costumes for collaborative projects with fellow storytellers in film, dance, music, and theater. Maisie has studied puppetry in academic and immersive contexts with Bread & Puppet Theater, The University of Connecticut, The O’Neill National Puppetry Conference, and the Chicago International Puppetry Festival Workshops. As a second generation arts educator they also work to encourage local young voices via puppetry and narrative arts workshops, summer camps, and festivals. This year they look forward to developing their own puppetry workshops in shadow play, and coordinating partnerships with local groups rooted in liberation.
Melissa Hyatt Foss is a musician, instrument-maker, composer and teaching artist hailing from Maryland and Vermont. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Art History at James Madison University she relocated to Argentina where she studied and developed her career as a performer, researcher and teaching artist for over a decade.
She completed her master’s degree in Musical Creation, New Technologies and Traditional Arts at the National University of Argentina, specializing in the recreation of ancient sound artifacts of the Americas and electroacoustic composition. For seven years she performed as a soloist, touring in Argentina and around the world, with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, which was recipient of the International Music Council's Musical Rights Award in 2013.
Melissa has cultivated an interdisciplinary practice that takes shape in hand-built musical instruments and organic electronica. Her work is a multifaceted contemplation of the beauty of our human heritage, the wisdom of our ancestors, and a search for their place in our world today.
Her composition “Hanblecheyapi: In Search of a Vision,” which was composed using a collection of her own recreations of historical instruments from the three Americas, was selected as one of the International Rostrum of Composers’ 12 most relevant contemporary works in 2018 and has since been broadcast by the BBC and other radio programs in Finland, Portugal, Hong Kong, and Austria.
She is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is a Resident Artist with the Creative Alliance.