Houses of Zodiac
Houses of Zodiac is an album and multimedia experience that combines spoken word, movement, music, and imagery into a unified exploration of love, loss, trauma and healing.The music is inspired by and interspersed with excerpts of poetry by Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey and Anaïs Nin. Choreography is by NYC Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin and Butoh dancer Dai Matusuoka of Sankai Juku beautifully captured on film by Murat Eyuboglu.
Akiho Cello Concerto
In the Summer of 2024 Jeffrey Zeigler will give the World Premier of a new Cello Concerto by the Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize nominated composer Andy Akiho with the Sun Valley Festival Orchestra. Future performances will take place with the Oregon Symphony, the Bozeman Symphony, the South Carolina Philharmonic and the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra.
We Were Fridays
We Were Fridays will be Jeffrey Zeigler’s fifth solo album. It will follow a story that began in the Griot tradition of West Africa, travel to South Carolina by way of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, then north by way of the Great Migration, and then continue through Vietnam and Japan. We Were Fridays will explore the music of the Gullah people of the Low Country of South Carolina, a community which to this day has preserved more of their West African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African American community in the United States. Gullah music has influenced spirituals, gospel, ragtime, rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop and jazz. We Were Fridays will extend this reach into the world of instrumental cello music. Told through cello, electronics, and film, We Were Fridays will explore forbidden love, fractured lines, and complex legacies and tell the story of how we became Fridays.
Archive of Desire
In Archive of Desire, Robin Coste Lewis, Julie Mehretu, Vijay Iyer, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Charlotte Brathwaite meditate collaboratively on the sensuality of C.P. Cavafy, diaspora, and the liminal spaces present everywhere in his work. The evening draws inspiration from Cavafy’s archive, processing the sonic, visual, and cultural tones found in his poetry through recitation, live music, electronics, and new visual work.
Insectum
Insectum will be a sonic exploration of the world of arthropods
From the current collapse of the global insect population through the pioneering work of seventeenth-century artist-entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, to the evolution of wings and exoskeletons six hundred million years ago. The work will be both a celebration of the most successful and longest existing multicellular group of animals on the planet, as well as a cautionary tale about how their current threatened status poses dangers for the entire global ecosystem. Insectum is a collaboration with Zeigler, Susie Ibarra and Graham Reynolds.
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is an opera by Paola Prestini, Royce Vavrek and Karmina Šilec that presents a dual track of storytelling by combining the original short story with portraits of Hemingway's life. The cast brings to life the seminal characters Santiago and Manolin, and amplifies the tale by bringing in the Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in Santería, the Afro-Caribbean faith, who was found floating on a wooden board off the coast of eastern Cuba in 1628, and a mixed chorus who help mix cocktails and bear witnesses to the storytelling onstage. Themes of baseball, pop culture, ecology, religion, and economy help paint a conflict between progress and tradition, craft passion and exploitation, ultimately shedding contemporary perspectives on this timeless tale. The opera is written for percussion, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and is narrated by Hemingway himself, and the bar owner, La Mar. The surreal tale unfurls amidst the making and drinking of cocktails.