LULA BURKE, News Editor—
The first installments of this semester’s Vail Series performances, featuring Grammy® Award-winning artist Aoife O’Donovan and work by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain in Blackbird, Fly, have set the stage for the rest of the series’ live, in-person shows.
This fall, the Vail Series is open to Denison students, faculty, and staff, and family of Denison community members who are fully vaccinated. Advanced tickets are required for all shows.
After teaching virtual masterclasses and hosting virtual performances last year, singer-songwriter O’Donovan was accompanied by a string quartet in Swasey Chapel Oct. 7. Her work included her 2020 release Bull Frogs Croon, a song cycle that used the words of poet Peter Sears. O’Donovan’s collaboration with Denison also provides students with a sneak peak of her album Age of Apathy, set to be released in January of 2022, and students have special access to the music video for her song Phoenix.
BLACKBIRD, FLY, the most recent installment of the series, was a concert for voice, body and strings held Oct. 7 in Sharon Martin Hall. The Vail website described that this performance “wove together a tapestry of movement, narrative, music, and Haitian folklore to engage audiences in dialog about critical questions of our time.” The piece, presented by sons of Haitian immigrants Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain, combined hip-hop, orchestra music, dance, song and poetry.
After a moving virtual performance in February 2021, the American Spiritual Ensemble will perform in-person on Feb. 9 of 2022. Comprised of some of the finest classically trained singers in the United States, the mission of the American Spiritual Ensemble is “to keep the American Negro spiritual alive.” The group has a multifaceted repertoire ranging from Broadway number to spirituals to jazz–90% of the members are accomplished soloists who have sung in theaters and opera houses world wide, including the “Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and abroad in Italy, Germany, Britain, Scotland, Spain and Japan” according to the group’s website.
The last performance is a vocal octet called Roomful of Teeth that uses avante-garde singing techniques to “expand the possibilities of the human voice.”
The singers will perform in Swasey Chapel on April 8, 2022. Tickets for this event go on sale in mid-March.