HOUGHTON -- Experience the electrifying concert and multimedia meditation that is ETHEL: Documerica at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6. Acclaimed as "unfailingly vital" (The New York Times), "brilliant," "downtown’s reigning string quartet" (The New Yorker), and "one of the most exciting quartets around" (Strad Magazine), ETHEL invigorates the contemporary music scene with exuberance, intensity, imaginative programming, and exceptional artistry.
At the heart of ETHEL is a quest for a common creative expression that is forged in the celebration of community. ETHEL's 2015-16 season celebrates the diversity of regional American music, anchored by a national tour of the evening-length ETHEL’s Documerica. Described by The New York Times as "new music bonding with old images in rich, provocative and moving ways," this program directed by Steve Cosson features montages by acclaimed projection artist Deborah Johnson in concert with commissioned work by Mary Ellen Childs, Ulysses Owens Jr., Jared Impichchaachaaha’ Tate and James "Kimo" Williams and new music by the members of ETHEL.
Documerica features video projections that parallel the music, based on the 1971 Environmental Protection Agency’s Project Documerica photographs, which capture America’s sometimes fabled, sometimes fraught relationship to its land. The project created an archive of thousands of photographs amassed over nearly a decade, an enormous artistic project that had been largely forgotten until recent digitalization. The imagery of Project Documerica is the inspiration for ETHEL’s Documerica, which taps the archive’s rich evocation of time and place and brings its visual and emotional impact into dialogue with the 21st century.
With Documerica, ETHEL invites audiences to contemplate individual and collective connections, action, and responsiveness to environmental and social challenges revealed through the repurposing of this distinctly American archive through the unifying language of art.
Tickets for ETHEL: Documerica are on sale now, $19 for adults, $10 for youth, and no charge for Michigan Tech students with the Experience Tech fee. Advance reserved seating is now available. Please order tickets early! Tickets are available by phone at (906) 487-2073, online at Rozsa.mtu.edu, in person at the Central Ticketing Office in the Student Development Complex, or at the Rozsa Box Office the evening of the performance. Please note the Rozsa Box Office only opens two hours prior to performances.