OTHER SEASONS, 2023
For Performa, Nikita Gale will consider the role of the season as an increasingly arbitrary unit of measure in the artist’s first live performance, OTHER SEASONS, combining light, live music, and atmospheric conditions in a meditation on labor, visibility, and the weather, performed by New York-based The Unsung Collective. Gale will reimagine Vivaldi’s iconic work The Four Seasons—a now-ubiquitous work that was considered groundbreaking when first performed in Amsterdam in 1725—as a compositional root, chosen as the classical equivalent to contemporary pop music. OTHER SEASONS will explore how a unit of measure that once provided a sense of stability—a structural flow led by the natural world, one intrinsic to most society’s patterns of behavior and economic functioning—has become increasingly unpredictable and erratic due to climate change’s volatile effect on the weather. Patterns that were once predictable can no longer be used as a reliable measure, instead continually surprise and confuse us. In conceiving OTHER SEASONS, Gale has also considered the use of a season as a structuring device for media and the influence this has had on the audience’s relationship to, and emotional expectations of, narrative. OTHER SEASONS will take aspects of Vivaldi’s composition and abstract them, reconfiguring the piece’s familiar musical phrases and combining acoustic performance — including choral, strings, wind, and percussion— with amplified sounds, to create an experience that conjures the ever-changing nature of the weather in both its banality and its drama.
Photography by Walter Wlodarczy and Maria Baranova
