CAP UCLA Presents DOROTHEA

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance presents Dorothea on Saturday, May 15, 2021, at 7 p.m. PDT. This performance will be free to enjoy on CAP UCLA Online. For more information on engaging with or supporting the arts and artists presented by CAP UCLA, visit support CAP UCLA.

Dorothea is the latest project from composer, singer, bandleader and two-time Grammy-nominated recording artist Ted Hearne. The video premiere of Dorothea will be a kaleidoscopic, lushly explosive post-pop song cycle embodying the viscerally tender, pathos-riddled, darkly funny poems of Dorothea Lasky. The performance will feature the heavenly vocals of Los Angeles-based polymath electronic musician Eliza Bagg, aka Lisel, with synth beats and rhapsodic textures. The video is intensified by the live in-process work of renowned visual artist Rachel Perry.

"I have a very personal relationship to this poetry, and felt as we were collaborating on this project that a new spirit was emerging," said Hearne. "It's the spirit of internal conflict, the struggle to unite the wildness of the true self with a presentation in space and time: the snake eating its own tail, sometimes ribald and feral, sometimes self-loathing, sometimes narcissistic, always folding in on itself, somewhere between desperate to be earnest and genuine and unable to take itself seriously. This is the debut of that multi-headed spirit, Dorothea."

Created with director Daniel Fish as creative consultant and filmed by Carole Kim, Dorothea creates a new space, outside the classical concert hall, outside the dance hall, into the wild of our own beating hearts.