SWALE SONG (serenata)

A performance featuring video, field recording, and live performed cello and voice, Swale Song is a serenata about roadway runoff, nonspecific source point pollution, and secrets hiding in plain sight.

Documentating everyday swale ecologies, this project leverages the serenata form, or serenade as it is better known in English. Serenatas are a kind of wistful musical greeting, performed by the artist to a lover, a dear friend, or a person to be deeply honored in some way. Serenata are also considered evening pieces, and are works meant to be experienced and shared at dusk or directly after, best enjoyed on introspective, quiet nights.

Dusk here is portrayed by field recordings of rain, frogs, and roadside ecologies in Louisiana. Pollution flows quietly into ditches, these little insistent inlets of wildlife, and toxins are folded into beautiful mires where transfiguration, love, pain, and possibility occur. Swale Song is a serenade to everyday landscapes, closeted queerness, secret beauty, secret pain.

SWALE SONG has been performed twice: in 2017 and 2020. Performance durations vary depending on the capacities of the venue.