STATION FOUR

 Art, regardless of the medium, is intended to pose questions to the audience and create opportunities for discourse. It allows the artist to enter the collective subconscious of the audience and affect them in profound ways. In my work, I create environments with music, dance and spoken words that address important societal issues of our time, challenging the status quo. My ensemble Station Four comprises five musicians, four dancers and a spoken word artist, all focused in our live performances on creating a positive image of productive cooperation, while accepting the tensions, discord and differences we as individuals carry into our attempts to forge relationships and communities.

The audience that attends a Station Four performance is enveloped in a visual and sonic collage, with sections notated for the musicians and choregraphed for the dancers and contrasting with sections for distinctive improvisations emerging from structures that enable performers freedom in decision-making. These are socially engaged performances, informed by Station Four members’ heightened awareness of today’s burgeoning wealth disparities, bigotry, misogyny and authoritarianism, responding with sound, word and movement.

My compositions involve structural variety. I employ blues derivatives, melodies that are without chords but rather motivic, as explored by Ornette Coleman, masters of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and John Coltrane. Our spoken word artist declaims, abstracts and personalizes textual fragments from writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Write and Gil Scott Heron, among others, often reflecting under-represented realities of low-income populations from direct experience, with affects ranging from distress to protest, imbued with humor and warmth.

Additionally, Station Four enacts a strong element of indeterminacy, as influenced by conceptualist John Cage and his followers.  We do not profess total control; we react to and with or regardless of circumstances. So each performance is a unique event, based on the group’s chemistry, its members interactions, and is unduplicable. Station Four is meant to convene creative individuals together to collectively inspire and push each other uncharacteristic areas of expression. Station Four presents a dynamic, engaging experience, inviting the audience to join in probing contemporary society’s conventions.