Sunday, March 04, 2012

BELLA GAIA

Posted by "CavalierZee"

Music by "Kenji Williams"


BELLA GAIA - A 5 min sample utilzing Visualizations by NASA, SCISS/Uniview.


The project is described as:


"A‘Living Atlas’ multimedia journey of our world, and expresses the deeply moving beauty of planet Earth as seen through the eyes of astronauts by successfully simulating space flight. Collaborating with NASA, BELLA GAIA is a new immersive theater experience, a portal for an audience to develop a deeper connection and empathy with our planet Earth. Created by award winning director and classically trained violinist Kenji Williams, BELLA GAIA features a 45 minute live performance by Kenji with orbiting visualizations of Earth from space."


Created by award winning director and classically trained violinist Kenji Williams, BELLA GAIA features a 45 minute live performance by Kenji and world music performers with  orbiting visualizations of Earth from space, and has performed over 70 shows around the world.



From high above the macrocosm down to life as we know it on terra firma, the universe-spanning narrative of Bella Gaia scaled effortlessly through world event scenes ranging from fires in the Amazon basin and time-lapse images of the Arctic ice melt to Egyptian pyramids, exotic Japanese temples, villages of Sri Lanka, and the jazzy urbane landscape of Manhattan. All along this voyage, our spacecraft was fueled by Williams’ soaring musical score that flowed transcendentally from undulating rhythms and intricately detailed melodies to soothing celestial textures embellished with hypnotic effects reminiscent of Jean-Luc Ponty’s Wandering on the Milky Way.

A ‘Living Atlas,’ BELLA GAIA has been designed as a work that will change and evolve over time. The potential to continually update and recreate the show is exciting and promising. If there were any immediate suggestions it might to be for Williams to stand out more against the awesome backdrop of the floating world so we could better see him gracefully weave his electro-acoustic tapestries into the total orbital gestalt. I’d also like hearing the astronauts words more so their sentiments are made all the more poignant at the moment when space, sound, image, mood, and wonder, collide.

BELLA GAIA is a powerful entertainment and educational outreach vehicle for performing arts theaters, festivals, planetariums, universities, government agencies and other institutions that wish to convey a broader world view that the destiny of humans and our planet Earth are inextricably linked. Often received with standing ovations, BELLA GAIA has been featured at top festivals such as the Smithsonian Folklife/NASA festival, 13 NASA events, COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, and to sold-out shows at digital planetariums. BELLA GAIA has delighted audiences from Europe to the USA to Japan, and has proven to engage a wide demographic from 3 year- olds, to students, to heads of government agencies.

(Download 2page PDF summary)


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