Wednesday, June 18th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present 2025 Artist-In-Residence Zosha Warpeha’s second commission Ballad & Air featuring Henry Birdsey performing on bagpipes at the 22 Boerum Pl. theater.
Following her first intimate solo exploration of the relationship between self and space, responsive tuning systems, and acoustic spatialization last Winter, Warpeha’s second program expands on these ideas, moving outwards to include a collaborator. She notes: “If my first performance existed in the air and shadows, each phrase an exhalation of breath and light dissipating into the room, this second exploration exists in the body; the corporeal experience of drone and resonance, the constancy of vibration, the physical tension between two tones.” Throughout her year-long residency, she will craft immersive experiences that invite reflection on collective memory.
Zosha Warpeha is a composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Using bowed stringed instruments alongside her own voice, her long-form compositions and freely improvised performances explore transformations of time and tonality. She performs primarily on Hardanger d’amore, a sympathetic-stringed relative of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, and her current work is heavily informed by the cyclical forms, rhythmic elasticity, and the physical momentum of Nordic folk music. Warpeha’s debut solo release on Relative Pitch Records, silver dawn, has been lauded as a “breathtaking dialogue between Warpeha and her instrument; tradition and experimentation; community and place” (Jacob Kopcienski, I Care if You Listen), her compositional process “subverting tradition not as a political act, but as a point of departure” (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street). Her work has been supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Henry Birdsey is a composer and musician from Vermont. He plays bagpipes and harmonicas, among other things, and tours regularly in the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK.
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