HOW TO SURVIVE Will Open at The Fabric Workshop and Museum

This fall, The Crossing, the four-time Grammy Award-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, will join forces with interdisciplinary artist and writer Suzanne Bocanegra for How to Survive, a multimedia installation that confronts questions about what it means to survive in a world where extreme weather is becoming increasingly familiar—and increasingly devastating. The world premiere will be on view November 20, 2026, through January 3, 2027, at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Conceived, written and designed by Bocanegra, How to Survive transforms The Crossing’s singers into a life-size, visual and sonic experience. Four new musical works—composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, Julia Wolfe and Ayanna Woods—form the backbone of the installation, with each movement responding to a different natural disaster: tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires. The work combines choral music, film, sound installation, lecture and gallery art to consider the increasingly urgent realities of climate change, environmental disruption and weather-related displacement.

Rather than treating climate disaster as an abstract or distant threat, How to Survive asks audiences to imagine themselves inside it. Practical survival instructions appear alongside music and moving images, creating an experience that is at once unsettling, darkly humorous, intimate, and deeply human. The installation considers not only how people physically survive disasters, but also how technology, community, memory, art and collective knowledge might help us navigate a rapidly changing world. The collaboration creates an immersive, instructional and at times droll—and terrifying—exploration of what it means to endure, with The Crossing providing the vocal force at its center.

“The disasters that shape How to Survive are no longer hypothetical,” said Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing. “They are part of the world we inhabit. This multimedia project gives us a way to think about that reality together—not through statistics or headlines alone, but through music, image, voice and the very human act of trying to understand what happens when the world changes beneath us.”

For Bocanegra, the project grew from a fascination with the seemingly ordinary instructions that become vital in extraordinary circumstances: where to go, what to do, how to stay calm, and how to help others. In How to Survive, those instructions become the raw material for an unusual artistic environment in which the voices of The Crossing coexist with images of natural disasters and the physical space of the museum.

The result is a work about preparedness and vulnerability, fear and resilience, technology and humanity—and the increasingly complicated relationship between people and the natural world.

The project also reflects The Crossing’s longstanding commitment to using new music to engage with urgent social and environmental questions. The ensemble has commissioned nearly 200 new works, many of which address social, environmental and political issues, and has released 41 albums, earning four Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance.

“How to Survive sits at the intersection of everything we are asking ourselves right now,” said Suzanne Bocanegra. “How do we live with uncertainty? How do we prepare for what we cannot predict? And how do we remain connected to one another when the forces around us seem beyond our control? The choir gives those questions a human voice. It’s hard to know what to do in an emergency. I thought if I wrote instructions for how to react in these situations, having them sung would make the instructions easier to remember.”

Bocanegra expands on these questions through her costume designs; the singers are dressed as if necessity, comfort, and style were determined by entirely found objects, clothing, and fabric. Objects that have lost their pre-disaster use take on new meaning. Hats are fashioned from piles of patterned textiles. There is pride and resignation in their choices.

“We're thrilled to welcome Suzanne Bocanegra and The Crossing back to The Fabric Workshop and Museum—two creative forces with whom we have previously collaborated,” said Kelly Shindler, The Marion Boulton 'Kippy' Stroud Executive and Artistic Director. “How to Survive arrives at a critical time when the perils of climate disaster are unfolding around us. This original work shakes us from complacency and imagines pathways for resilience.'

How to Survive is made possible through generous support by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Carol Westfall, The New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis, and the National Endowment for the Arts.