Thirst & Quenching: A Music & Poetry Salon
Free (suggested donation: $10-$15; $15-$25 to support program, $25+ to support future seasons)
- Ros Zimmermann, poet / sculptor
- Dara Barrois/Dixon, poet
Julien Malaussena — 8 Minutes after Boiling
Marcos Balter — Evens
Improvisation — Selected works (group improvisations incorporating machines, drawing inspiration from the Waterworks Museum)
Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, in collaboration with curator Arlinda Shtuni, presents a unique salon experience inspired by her new exhibit, Reservoir: What the Water Knows on view at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. Showcasing new and rendered artworks by six noted artists – A+J Art+Design/ Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier, Caitlin & Misha, Heather Kapplow, Nathaniel Price, Nancy Selvage and Ros Zimmermann – the exhibit probes our complicated relationship with water. It looks deeply into how climate warming is impacting each of us and invites us to consider: how are our watery bodies registering and responding to these shifts?
The Thirst and Quenching Salon offers a program of musical compositions and poetry that explore these aqueous quotidian needs and deeper longings. Drawn from diverse experimental traditions, the musical pieces vividly evoke the element of water in an array of states and sonic manifestations. Containing notated and open-ended elements, the works reflect the unpredictability of water's meandering ways. While noted poets Dara Barrois/Dixon and Ros Zimmermann's verse and experiments with sound render palpable the perpetual process of change in and around us, the yearning for connection, and the debt we owe to the world’s continuing beauty.
About Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble
Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble is a leading presenter of classical music of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The ensemble was founded in 1975 as part of New England Dinosaur Dance Theater, and has been independently incorporated since 1977. Under the artistic directorship of Hubert Ho and Felicia Chen, Dinosaur Annex is passionately dedicated to bringing cutting-edge music of living composers to a diverse public and maintaining an outlet for music that is otherwise unheard. The ensemble aims to foster appreciation of contemporary music through exposure to the work of living composers; and to promote understanding of contemporary music through educational events, composer commissions, multi-media collaborations, performances, and recordings.
Dinosaur Annex's history reflects more than 45 years of high-level music-making, and consistently rave reviews. Dinosaur Annex showcases a variety of composers and frequently invites guest conductors and soloists. The many composers promoted by Dinosaur Annex include John Harbison, Yu-Hui Chang, Elena Ruehr, Lee Hyla, Gunther Schuller, Keeril Makan, Tamar Diesendruck, Evan Ziporyn, Ezra Sims, Charles Shadle, Eve Beglarian, Scott Wheeler, and Lewis Spratlan. Dinosaur Annex is especially proud of its role in effecting a Pulitzer Prize for Spratlan's previously unknown opera, Life Is A Dream.
https://www.dinosaurannex.orgAbout Ros Zimmermann, poet / sculptor
Ros Zimmermann, a writer and artist, lives and works in Lexington MA.
https://www.roszimmermann.com/About Dara Barrois/Dixon, poet
Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) was born in Louisiana on December 30, 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green State University.
Barrois/Dixon is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022); In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017); You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009); Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006); Reverse Rapture (Wave Books, 2005), which received the 2006 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; Hat On a Pond (Wave Books, 2002); Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Our Master Plan (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), which received the Phi Beta Kappa Award; Blue for the Plough (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992); The Book of Knowledge (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1988); All You Have in Common (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1980); and Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas Press, 1977).
About Barrois/Dixon's work, John Ashbery has said: "It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren't—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again."
The Harvard Review has said "Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier's colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence."
Barrois/Dixon's work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and The American Poetry Review. In 2005, she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She's been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah.
Barrois/Dixon lives and works in Factory Hollow in Greenfield, Massachusetts.