Details

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream is an experimental, immersive and community-activated performance that explores entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, transforms historic buildings into instruments, and reimagines opera as a collective artistic process.

The first iteration of this opera premiered on the roof of the historic Bendix Building in Los Angeles on November 16, 2024. This open-air opera in-the-round brought twenty-two musicians into conversation with a free-roaming audience and the open-air soundscape of a bustling Los Angeles. For those fifty-three minutes, the sonic landscape of the city coexisted and coevolved with the sonic landscape of the opera. We practiced deep listening on local and global scales.

This community-activated performance catalyzed new possibilities for operatic expression. The opera reconfigured listeners into performers, transmogrifying into a collective artistic process. The experiment pulled questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another. We discovered different ways of tuning in to the acoustical architecture of the Bendix Building, to our surrounding cityscape, and to our changing world. How can learning the stories of our more-than-human neighbors help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of Los Angeles? Fusing instrumentation, sound sculpture and speculative worldbuilding, the project weaves multiple perspectives of the city’s histories, carrying us back into deep time and forward into the future.

The opera experimented with geophone technology to expand the potential of site-specific, interactive, and community-activated performance. A geophone is a bridge that links sound and architecture. It is a piece of seismological equipment used to pick up sounds normally outside of the human range of hearing, such as the low-frequency rumbles of a building experiencing phenomena like wind or human activity. It’s a means of putting a finger on vibrational architectures, on the hidden pulse of a site. Geophones render audible the inaudible. In the case of this performance, the geophone transformed the Bendix Building into an ephemeral instrument.

We experimented with different means of listening, via vibration detection, tactility and bone conduction. The musicians roamed the roof while playing, and the audience was invited to move with them, to physically feel different kinds of instrumentation and vibration in our bones, to register various degrees of resonance in our bodies. We experienced listening beyond the human ear, via bone conduction. We experienced vibrational communication, a realm where touch and sound are linked by the brassy grumble of a sousaphone played at close range, by the humming vibration of a grand piano being played full-weight just a few inches away.

Meanwhile, the geophone picked up on our movements and translated them into audible sounds. Audience members become listeners as well as sounders, agents in the creation of an ephemeral soundscape via their movements and soundings. The opera became a means of attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another.

The geophone enabled the musicians to improvise with their environment, bringing previously un-hearable sounds (created by the building, the street below, and the audience) into conversation with live instrumentation. Musicians and audience members engaged in a collective process of building new sonic worlds. Together we transformed the roof of the Bendix Building into a community-activated instrument, an acoustical commonage, and a space for collective listening and collective improvisation, radical noticing and regenerative world-making.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals and climatic phenomena, the opera expands our human-centered understandings of perception and world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. How do other animals make sound? How do they listen? Wild bats and beetles, sea lions and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and bees are among the many animals voicing the field recordings. The opera asks questions about multispecies relationships and interdependence--about more-than-human intelligence and multitudinous means of knowing and existing—while imagining futurities that complexify our understandings of sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and possibility. What does it mean to find new ways to listen—for example via vibration, tactility, and bone conduction—and to pay attention in these uncertain times? How can listening help us radically reimagine new ecologies and interspecies futures? How can we imagine the city through the sensory worlds of its more than human dwellers? Can exploring different means of sensing support radical re-imaginings of potential ecological futurities? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of political act?

The opera hybridized noise, sound sculpture, field recordings, live free improvisational instrumentation, and multi-channel video to create interactive and immersive multimedia ecosystems that opened our minds to more-than-human timescales and to introduce new ways of thinking about ecology, history and environmental relationships.

Images of respiring sharks projection-mapped on warehouse exterior walls showed gills and lateral lines. Lateral lines are structures linking touch and sound, tools for vibrational communication that translate particle motion phenomena (sound) into sensory information. They enable a shark to sense shifts in water pressure and movement—the directionality of a passing fish, for instance. They are another means of listening. Shark snouts are pitted with electromagnetic-sensing Ampullae of Lorenzini, which help them detect weak electrical fields cast by living prey—a fish contracting its muscle, for instance—as well as the earth’s electrical fields. These electroreceptors may even help sharks navigate by the earth’s magnetic field during migrations.

What can we learn from taking a moment to consider the sensory worlds of sharks? To consider the specialized sensitivities that guide their lives, from the electrical currents swirling around a carcass feed that dictate dominance and who may eat next, to the swelling pull of instinct and sensation that catalyzes waves of collective, coordinated mass migration? What can we learn from considering the multiplicities of more-than-human intelligence exhibited by the diversity of beings with whom we share this planet? When we consider the intricacies of shark sensation and migration, what can we learn about own means of operating as animal bodies in the context of our own sensory worlds?

Images and sounds from insects are also paired. Biotremology refers to animal communication via vibration. It is a multidisciplinary field that hybridizes entomology and physics to understand vibrational communication among insects. Insects create communicative vibrations via stridulation (rubbing body parts together; cicadas rub their wings and vibrate their tymbals, or sound producing organs), tremulation and percussion. These signals are transmitted via substrate. Leaf hoppers, for instance, communicate via vibrations borne by plant tissues. How can thinking about—and listening to—biotremology expand our appreciation for sensory diversity?

The human ear is only one means of perceiving sound. Can finding new means to listen—via bone conduction and vibrational communication for instance—and new means to think about listening—contemplating for instance how a shark listens, or a cicada—catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human ways of sensing space, place and time? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening, to pay attention? What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of political act?

We humans are enfleshed, enmeshed, entangled; we are beings living among other beings, on a rapidly-changing planet. What do we have to learn by pausing to listen to—and learn from—our more-than-human neighbors? Frog calls were recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Beached icebergs were recorded in eastern Greenland, melting and releasing bubble-pops of ancient atmospheres. Bugling tule elks—which sound like A string harmonics— guided the creation of compositions with viola harmonics.

Silk moths, penguins, frogs, tortoises, Golden-Headed Lion tamarins and sea caves enter into conversation with live instrumentation. By bringing the sounds of sea caves local to Los Angeles into conversation with interspecies collaborations and sounds from farther afield, the opera aims to cultivate relational thinking about geological time, ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. How can we practice listening locally and globally at the same time?

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider a different sonic portrait of Los Angeles, and different understandings of time, sounding and sensing. When we hear the glassy bells of sea star tube feet, we are hearing those feet walking, tasting and smelling all at once. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. Lending an ear to beetles lends attention to sensing the world through vibrations. Buzzing cicadas—echoes of the Jurassic period--reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.

They also reveal a world of present-day insect population collapse. Indeed, moments throughout the opera of riotous interspecies abundance—singing humans, sawing cicadas, chirping crickets, braying penguins—are interspersed with sudden silence, echoing the precarity of endangered ecologies and endangered soundscapes.

Recordings of stridulating crabs speak to a time before Pangea’s fracturing, when crabs started evolving the ridges that made possible their soniferous capabilities. The opera interweaves sounds of living fossils like hagfish—benthic scavengers who clean whale falls and other carcasses—and sturgeon—dinosaur-era fish capable of electroreception and survivors of multiple mass extinctions—to bring us into relation with long time. Recordings of trilobites—crustaceans that like hagfish have been around for the past 300 million years—bring us into relation with the soundscapes of our ancient seas.

The sighs of respiring Galapagos tortoises speak not only to a life lived on a more-than-human timescale, but to engaging with time itself in entirely different ways. These methusalean giants can go on wading in pond muck and feasting on wild guavas for two hundred years. They live slowly, breathe slowly and die slowly. At rest, their hearts beat 6 times per minute. They bring us into relation with long time.

Pleistocene echoes like Przewalksi’s horses and Bristlecone pine trees—organisms that lived on this planet in the time of wooly mammoths and dire wolves—bring our attention to the soundscapes of previous geologic epochs. Projection-mapped moving imagery featuring Przewalksi’s horses and Golden-Headed Lion tamarins, whale sharks and swell sharks, scorpionfish and moray eels transformed the opera into an immersive sensory experience.

Bristlecone pine trees and sea caves are sites for researching sonic and material decay. The resonance of a sea cave—activated by Rigby’s sound sculptures and cello bows—speaks to the way geologic time shapes physical space and acoustical range. The resonance of a bristlecone pine speaks to the ways that long time have acted upon a living organism. Rigby bowed wires to activate the resonant signature of a bristlecone tree in southern California (without physically touching the tree). When we hear the vibrations of the pine tree’s fibers being activated by a sound sculpture, we are listening to the tree’s acoustical anatomy as well as its life history. Experimental lutherie tunes our ears to the deep past and the uncertain present. We are hearing the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena—culminating in the case of this particular individual with a series of rapid, climate change-exacerbated firestorm events—acting upon an organism. And we are hearing the sonification of an organism that has witnessed the coming and going of ice ages, the rise and collapse of empires. The planet that this particular bristlecone pine tree sprouted into is very different than the planet it inhabits today. The tree is a living bridge between worlds.

The sea cave is a site for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, sonic and material degeneration, shifting seascapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. It is a place to think about growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and breathing.

If the ocean is our planet life support system and our greatest ally against the climate crisis, then what are ways to think about sea caves? Sea caves are sound sculptures that give voice to and are voiced by the ever-shifting seascape. What do we have to learn by taking the time to pay attention to these sites, to listen? How can learning the stories of sea caves help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our oceans? Fusing instrumentation, sound sculpture and speculative worldbuilding, the project weaves multiple perspectives of this sea cave’s histories, carrying us at once back into deep time and forward into an uncertain future. What does a sea cave’s memory sound like?

When we hear the sea cave’s resonant signature being activated by the sound sculpture, we are listening to the cave’s acoustical anatomy as well as its history. We are hearing the resonance of millennia of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism. Vibrational architecture opens our minds to geologic forces and geologic time.

A site like the Bendix Building has a unique sonic signature. The acoustical resonance of this site—as picked up by the geophone—echoes the history of the building’s fabrication and evolving roles over the years.

Just as the architecture of human-made spaces hold memory, so too does the acoustical architecture of a sea cave. The sea cave tunnels deep into a decaying cliff, its dark channels winding far beyond the eyes’ reach. Sounding the sea cave helps us understand its spatiality, but only ambiguously. We hear the resonant growls of the cave being activated by bow and wire, played out in a cave that has been sculpted over millennia and continues to be sculpted by increasingly erratic climatic phenomena. We are hearing the physicality of the cave via resonance and echo; we are listening to cave memory.

Though the sea cave is made of stone, it is anything but static. It is as much in flux as the shrinking / expanding tideline, as the daily ebb and flow of water, though governed by much slower forces of change. The fragility of our coastline’s health and the fragility of this eroding cave are in daily conversation with tides bearing microplastic-suffused, acidified, and ever-warming waters. This is a composition of decomposition and re-composition. Listening to the cave enables us to experience tidal flows and movements across time and space. The project imagines a radical intimacy with the sea cave, the planet, and ourselves.

Microscope slides of diatoms recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California speak to the diatoms that once flourished in the primordial sea that inundated present-day Los Angeles. Megalodons, prehistoric sharks with bus-length bodies and jaws ten feet wide, once swam directly through what is now the Bendix Building. Now-extinct ammonoids (coiled-shelled cephalopods), saber-toothed salmon and sea turtles swam the waters where City Hall now stands. Later, after the sea’s retreat and the arrival of an ice age, Los Angeles was home to saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, mammoths and dire wolves. How can thinking about LA’s distant and not-so-distant histories help us make space for imagining possible futurities?

When we hear the rasping sounds of hagfish feeding, we are hearing the animals scraping their rows of keratinous teeth on squid and fish meat. We are hearing the sounds of a basal, benthic species who scavenges the sea floor by sense of smell and touch. We are listening to an animal that hasn’t changed much from the Late Carboniferous period, around 300 million years ago, a time before dinosaurs. We are listening to a living fossil. Listening to living fossils brings us into relation with long time.

At the Bodega Marine Laboratory, Rigby also recorded the following sounds: the radula of a predacious snail drilling through a mussel shell, abalone feeding on kelp, and sea stars and sea urchins walking on glass. Rigby paired footage of sea urchins in the company of more totemic animals, like wolves and bears. Can listening to sea urchin feet inspire curiosity, empathy, even awe? Rigby recorded the sounds of hagfish tunneling into decomposing squids at Chapman University in Orange, California. She recorded audio of an octopus scraping the hydrophone with her radula at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Long Beach, California.

The opera draws questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of kinship, care and worlding, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? What are new ways of learning from the intelligences of other living beings? What do we stand to gain from cultivating an upwelling of earthly wonder and expanded empathy?

Rigby performed live on viola as well as a sound sculpture that she welded from sousaphones, French horns and found brass objects salvaged from waste streams. She scored the composition for cello, viola, violin, sousaphone, French horn, tuba, piano, and choral elements. Among the vocalists present were two choirs: Liminal Voices and Orchestra (a vocal collective of LGBTQ+/Gender Expansive/BBIA communities) and 8TPS Choir (a vocal collective of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive musicians).

The ensemble featured Nicki Chen, Hua Hsuan Tseng, Rogelio Resendiz, Ben Kinsley, Leora Malka, Andrew Fong, Chris McKelway, Mason Moy, Simone Maura, Spencer Bowie, Grant Laren, Adrian Narro, Andrew Dalziell, Dr. Fabián Rodríguez Castro, Dylan Leisure, Jessica Joyce, Charis Tshihamba, Tanner Pfeiffer, Socks Whitmore, Perigee Vitz-Wong  and Anastasia Gastelum. The ensemble improvised off of Rigby’s composition, creating an unrepeatable event. We wove instrumental music, noise, field recordings, live cityscape sounds like car horn honks and street traffic, and geophonic audio into unpredictable soundscapes.

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Credits

Opera hosted by Heidi Duckler Dance in LA. Heidi Duckler Dance creates site-specific performances that transform spaces. By migrating off the stage and into surrounding environments, Heidi Duckler Dance invites audiences to see their communities in a new light.

Audio recorded by Ben Kinsley.

Audio mastered by Michael Southard.

Video documented by Ring Road Sessions.

Supported by Heidi Duckler Dance, CultureHub Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Thank you to the Bemis Center for the Arts Experimental Music + Sound Art Fellowship and Okada Sculpture Facility.

Many thanks to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Bodega Marine Laboratory and Chapman University, where I recorded sounds made by hagfish, sea urchins, sea stars and more.

Tracks

1. Intro

2. The Fashion District

3. Geophone on the Roof

4. Overture

5. Whale Sharks

6. Upwelling

7. Sounding the Sousaphones

8. Butterflies Nectar on Rotting Figs

9. Fluorescent Pink Scorpionfish

10. A Bat Listens

11. Pharyngeal Jaws

12. Brumation

13. Life Cycle of a Fever Dream

14. Old House

15. Diatoms Live in Houses Made of Glass

16. Cicadas

17. Life Cycle of a Fever Dream (Reprise)

18. Swell Shark Eyes are Supernovas

19. Silk Moth Shivers

20. A Sea Star Walks on Glass

21. Fortissimo

22. Hagfish Stygian

23. Tortoise Breathing, Eating Guavas

24. Cormorants Roosting in the Salt Ghost Trees

25. Los Angeles Was Once a Prehistoric Sea

26. Finale

27. Epilogue: An Octopus Scrapes the Hydrophone With Her Radula