We Don't Need the Sea to Drown
National Sawdust Presents Coco Karol and Sxip Shirey’s We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown,
June 6 & 7
Developed through a process of embodied interviews, Karol and Shirey’s collaboration entwines composition for voice, dance, and sound objects, considering a poetics of place and placelessness amidst a world altered by climate change, global conflict, and migration
This performance is one of 15 world premieres commissioned by National Sawdust for its 10th season, looking into the future with artists who’ve defined and expanded the institution
"We don’t need the sea to drown, we are drowning right here”- said by a refugee amidst flooding on Nauru Island detention center outside Sydney Australia. His words were recounted to Karol in a movement interview with Amnesty International liaison in her research for The Gauntlet: Sydney Opera House, 2017.
National Sawdust, the women-led, Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based non-profit cultural institution, presents We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown, created by dancer and choreographer Coco Karol and composer and sound artist Sxip Shirey. The multidisciplinary performance is a transportive part of Karol and Shirey’s years-long community engagement project gathering stories of ecological memory, migration, and climate grief and processing them through a plurality of voices, bodies, and music-making objects. We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown is one of fifteen world premiere commissions of major new works from National Sawdust in its 10th Anniversary Season, featuring visionary artists looking beyond disciplinary limits, beyond tradition, and beyond the present.
The performances at National Sawdust combine stories gleaned from Karol’s movement interviews with Brooklyn-based artists and community leaders; Shirey’s renowned object oriented composition; and the duo’s celebrated choral form, the Gauntlet, where corridors of singers pass a libretto downstream in cascading tones and phrases, as audiences experience waves of sound. The Gauntlet, as a form within the piece, can hold multiple narratives at the same time without favoring one or the other; carrying competing and even contradictory understandings. This form, evoking the flow and overflow of water, continues to grow in thematic resonance in this contemplation of an inundated world. (Previous Gauntlet performances were presented by venues that include Sydney Opera House, Rockefeller Center, the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, and the Fisher Center at Bard.)
Additionally, performances contain a composition for dance, voice, tuned glass and objects, including drip irrigation bags that Shirey and Karol manipulate to create phasing polyrhythms by dripping water onto tonal metal bowls. The multi-pronged project also includes a documentary film by Jacob McCoy charting personal narratives of global climate changes while exploring the poetics of memory, archive, ancestral time, and meaning-making; pieces of this are incorporated into the performance at National Sawdust.
For these performances, Coco Karol has conducted embodied interviews with people around New York City and Upstate—considering, on a hyper-local level, human relationships to water, sea levels, and a possible future bereft of snow or monarch butterflies. These interviews are a 20-minute process of movement and dialog, the conjunction of which affords different types of access to memory and language than a formal seated interview.
Shirey, who most recently at National Sawdust developed the Foley for Paola Prestini’s opera Silent Light (based on Carlos Reygada’s acclaimed 2007 film), here continues to apply his mad inventor prowess in turning objects into expressive instruments that can perform dextrous compositions—echoing the emotional and physical worlds conjured in the interviews. He says, “Object oriented composition is like cooking with good ingredients. Here are 4 things that sound beautiful — it’s like having heirloom tomatoes, sea salt, good pasta, and good olive oil. You kind of can’t fuck it up. You put these objects in a beautiful relationship together and they’ll do amazing things. And they have a direct emotional impact. It’s beautiful to hear a marble drop, to hear it roll, and hear it die.”
Karol, in turn, brings the stories first recounted to her through movement back into moving bodies, in dance—a component she considers another “object in the larger object oriented composition” of the piece. “Dance can change the way you hear sound,” she says. “Dance can turn the water that’s dripping from the sound of dripping water into a rhythm. You see the rhythm in the body and suddenly hear the water as a drumbeat. We’re interested in agency as a listener and the audience having an embodied experience, so when there are polyrhythms going on, you as a listener can make a choice about which sonic story you hear—just as you can choose which sung narrative fragment to focus on.”
While the performance contains grief and calamity, it also is suffused with hope. Says Karol, “When you remember something you’ve lost, it stirs up grief but also fondness and joy. Hope motivates pro-social behavior and connection, and that’s where real change can occur.”
We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown is performed by Sxip Shirey, Coco Karol, Jonny Rodgers, Rima Fand, Nick Demeris, Alaine Ferris, Catherine Brookman, Miguel Guzman, Jalen Hicks, Raquel Klein, Nathan Repaz, Onome, Lacy Rose.
We Don’t Need the Sea to Drown premieres June 6 & 7 at 7:30pm (doors at 6:30pm) at National Sawdust (80 N 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11249). Tickets can be purchased at https://www.nationalsawdust.org/performances.
About Coco Karol
Coco Karol is a dancer/ choreographer/ educator who creates cross-disciplinary performance works concerned with meaning-making and embodied memory. She uses dance as a form of ethnography, and developed a methodology to interview people while moving with them. Karol holds a BFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts (2005) and an MFA from Hollins University (2015). She has had an expansive dance career in New York, dancing for Misnomer Dance Theater, Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance Company, and Christopher Williams, as well as being a part of projects by Bill Young, Jose Navas, and Steven Petronio. She has choreographed works for stage, film, theater, and public space and has collaborated with notable visual artists and musicians, getting to work with artists such as Bjork, Amanda Palmer, Steven Sebring, Zoe Keating, C. Finley, SWOON, Sxip Shirey, and others. Her own works have been shown at the Sydney Opera House, NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, National Sawdust, BAX, Ibeam, Spectrum, D.U.M.B.O Under the Bridge Arts Festival, Triskelion, Galapagos, Death By Audio, and curated by AUNTS. Karol teaches embodied-inquiry movement practices, technique classes in contemporary forms, and MUNZ® FLOOR, a somatic spinal health method and GYROTONIC®. She has taught workshops at universities including Tisch NYU, Norwegian Theater Academy, and Ohio University. Karol is fiscally sponsored by The Field. She started Red Sole Productions, LLC in 2011. (findingcoco.net)
About Sxip Shirey
Sxip Shirey is a composer and sound artist based in New York City. He is the composer and music director for the circus arts production LIMBO, produced by Melbourne based Strut N Fret Productions House and London based, Underbelly and South Bank Center. LIMBO has toured internationally since 2015, including seasons at Sydney Opera House, London’s Southbank Center, the Bogota International Theater Festival, Munich’s Tollwood Festival and an appearance at Madonna’s 57th Birthday Day party. Shirey teaches workshops in "Text and Object Oriented Composition" at Norwegian Theater Academy in Fredrickstad which he considers the Black Mountain College of NOW. Shirey's ongoing immersive choral works, The Gauntlet, developed with his artistic partner Coco Karol, have been performed at Rockefeller Center, The Sydney Opera House, Bard College and for the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a collaborator of singer and song composer Rhiannon Giddens; released tracks include, “All Babies Must Cry” and “Woman of Constant Sorrow.” Shirey has presented at TED (2008), is a United States Artist Fellow (2011) and has been artist curator (2016) and artist in residence (2017) at National Sawdust, Brooklyn. Shirey composed for the short Neil Gaiman film "Statuesque" which premiered on Christmas Day on SKY TV, UK (2009). Other compositional highlights include composition for choreographer Dan Safer’s The One You Feed (2019) at M.I.T., and music for Little Amal’s visit with the artist Swoon’s Sibilant Sisters (2022) presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse. Shirey co-composed the music for No One Is Forgotten based on a play written by Winter Miller that was released on Lexicon Classics records in 2023. Shirey produced the electronic tracks and did sound design on Paola Prestini’s Old Man and the Sea opera and upcoming Sensorium Ex, a muti-modal opera, operating at the intersection of AI, disability, and the arts. (sxipshireymusic.com)
This presentation is commissioned by National Sawdust, with the generous support of the Eric and Barbara Carle Foundation.
About National Sawdust
National Sawdust is a dynamic non-profit cultural institution that commissions, produces, and presents programming rooted in sound and supports multidisciplinary artists and arts organizations in the creation of innovative new work. Founded in 2015, National Sawdust operates out of an intimate space, equipped with a state-of-the-art Meyer spatial sound system, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it is one of the few remaining cultural venues. The New York Times has described National Sawdust as “a triumphantly successful performance space that stands for a hip, sophisticated brand of new music.” Composer Paola Prestini, who co-founded National Sawdust, serves as its artistic director, alongside managing director Ana De Archuleta, making National Sawdust one of the few New York cultural institutions led by women.
National Sawdust provides artists across musical genres and artistic disciplines with comprehensive support including commissions, workshops, residencies, public performances, recording, mentorship, and professional development. It aims to be not only a home for its community of artists, but also a place for audiences to discover wide-ranging music at accessible ticket prices. The institution’s mentorship initiatives counteract industry barriers and the historic marginalization of diverse communities in the arts, providing artists and arts workers with guidance, resources, and relationships with established visionaries to accelerate their careers.
Founded by Kevin Dolan and designed by Brooklyn’s Bureau V, National Sawdust is constructed within the existing shell of a century-old sawdust factory, preserving the authenticity of Williamsburg’s industrial past while providing a refined and intimate setting for the exploration of new music. At the venue’s core is a flexible chamber hall, acoustically designed by renowned engineering firm Arup to provide the highest-quality experience of both unamplified and amplified music.
Press Contacts
Blake Zidell and Caitlyn Tella at Blake Zidell & Associates: 917.572.2593, blake@blakezidell.com and caitlyn@blakezidell.com