Douglas Detrick’s podcast and live performance project More Devotedly brings personal stories on stage in an honest look at the emotional landscape of climate change.
Two musicians, a dancer and poet address their personal and collective emotional state as the climate crisis progresses in More Devotedly Vol. II as part of the 2020 Fertile Ground Festival, February 1 and 2 at Shout House in SE Portland.
Volume II: Climate Crisis, the second installment of the podcast and live performance project More Devotedly, insists that we know the facts about climate change—what’s needed now is an emotional transformation that leads to action. This one-hour program combines live music, poetry, dance, and audio storytelling to tell three stories that pivot around the central theme of climate change, curated by multi-instrumentalist, composer, and podcaster Douglas Detrick. Volume II: Climate Crisis takes place as part of the 2020 Fertile Ground Festival at Shout House (210 SE Madison St #11, Portland, OR 97214) February 1 (5:30 & 9 pm) and February 2 (1 & 5:30 pm). Tickets $20, $10 for students are available at fertilegroundpdx.org as are festival pass reservations. More details at moredevotedly.com.
Volume II explores questions like: What does race have to do with collecting wildlife data in Denali National Park? How do we reconcile our armchair activism with our private realities? What emotional response to the changing world around us would you have to experience to incite real, lasting change in your daily behavior? Douglas Detrick with violinist and looper Joe Kye, dancer Stephanie McCollough, and poet Lara Messersmith-Glavin invite you to open your hearts and your minds to the enormity of our collective challenge for a single hour.
Based on an interview with data scientist Ratnanjali Adhar about her experiences in Denali National Park, “The Bear in the Room” with music by Kye, peels back layers of science, identity, connectivity, and gender showing how even dispassionate research is reflected in the human dimension. Writer Messersmith-Glavin’s meditation on place and change invites the listener to consider their own stakes in nature: Where is your line? When do you take action?
At the beginning of their creative process, Detrick and McCollough recorded a frank conversation about climate change. In the performance they will assemble response to the questions that aren’t answerable in words, using movement and music to turn the inadequacies that they acknowledged in conversation into a constructive, personal artistic statement.
Learn more at moredevotedly.com. More Devotedly Volume II is supported in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
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ABOUT MORE DEVOTEDLY
More Devotedly is a gathering point for a community of people who recognize the power of the arts to create change, and who understand how to use that power. Through live events, the podcast, and new music by Detrick and collaborators, the project aims to inspire action and engagement. The title of the project is inspired by conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein’s reaction to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1968 when he said, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
The artists who will share their ideas and experience with the project are following that advice, but in many cases, they’re doing much more. Going beyond the traditional confines of artistic practice, they’re using new tools and tactics to realize a future that is more inclusive, more just, and more peaceful. More Devotedly seeks to help its community to recognize its power as messengers, warriors, and healers, and use that power in the cultural and political realms.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE TEAM
Douglas Detrick is a composer, songwriter, trumpeter, banjoist, podcast producer and arts leader whose work in these diverse areas is distinguished by its quiet thoughtfulness and its embrace of good ideas from unconventional sources.
He was awarded a 2017 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and leads the chamber-folk quartet Little One, chamber-jazz quintet AnyWhen Ensemble, and is the Executive and Artistic Director of the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. He has performed throughout the United States at venues including the Stone, the Phillips Collection and many universities.
Born in Korea and raised in Seattle, singer/composer/violinist-
Stephanie McCollough is a visual artist and dancer. Through her work she strives to express truth of feeling through minimal and precise emotive gestures, yielding an intimate and specific emotional experience for the audience. She studied ballet, jazz, and modern dance as a child and adolescent, and she is currently a student of Flamenco and Argentine Tango. She studied Communication Design at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and works as a graphic designer in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and two cats.
Lara Messersmith-Glavin is a writer, educator, and performer based in Portland, Oregon. She serves on the board of directors of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, as well as on the editorial collective for their house journal, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Her work has appeared in Across the Margin, Still Point Arts Quarterly, MaLa Literary Journal, Anchored in Deep Water: the Fisherpoets Anthology, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Gertrude Press Book Reviews, Selkie, the EMMA Talks-inspired collection Radiant Voices: 21 Feminist Essays for Rising Up, and elsewhere. She was awarded the AtM 2018 Best Nonfiction Award, as well as the Chinalyst Award for Best Travel Writing in 2008. When she's not in a classroom or working on a book, she can be found performing onstage with other Fisherpoets around the Pacific Northwest, exploring the woods with her child, or swinging kettlebells at the gym where she coaches. Check out her work at queenofpirates.net.
