ELATION IV

ELATION IV

photos by Debra S Evans

Performed at PS1 MoMA in Queens, NY and at REDCAT Theatre in Los Angeles, CA.

Elation 4 is a 25 minute operetta as part of a sequential trans-feminist opera series. Elation presents a sacred, queer ceremony as a reverential site for the composition and abstraction of queer, marginalized belief systems. Through music, movement, and costume, Colin Self conducts a liturgy to celebrate the dawning of global feminized consciousness, and a grievance for failing systems. These actions and transformations result in communions of media, liturgy, and dance. Elation’s aim is to follow the energetic trajectories of these queer communions in order to foster discourse around our beliefs.

For Elation 4, a tetrahedron adorned with LED lights is mounted in a blacked-out room, on a stage with a mirror podium at it’s core, and a large but quiet fan behind the stage. A ten-person choir barricades the alter from the audience. The choir is merely invisible in the blacked-out space except for two LED lights on the eyes of each silhouette. Wearing a white cloak, and two wings of LED lights, Colin enters the stage and conducts gestural, vocal, and energetic movements. Colin guides the liturgy into formal delivery of song as the choir joins in as done in liturgical ceremonies. The performance is bookended with processional movement along an outstretched aisle of fabric. Audio is conducted over a speaker system, and all singers have microphones.

photos by Debra S Evans