Walking in the City

Inspired by Michel de Certeau's essay of the same name, "Walking in the City" is an interdisciplinary performance piece, in which Elodia sets the work of eight Brooklyn-Based poets to a suite of music and video. The suite features eight different poems, which discuss each poet’s experience of walking down a street in their neighborhood. The music Elodia creates is a bricolage of sampled text from recordings of the poets reading their work, field recordings from the neighborhoods, melodies/harmonies he composes/improvises, and rhythms he plays live on the drums. The musical qualities of the human voice are at the center of the project, as Elodia attends to the way the poets modulate their personal expression through variations in timbre, range, dynamic, rhythm, cadence, form, pitch, dynamic, etc. These musical elements are accompanied by visual projections of footage from the locations and neighborhoods the poets speak about in their texts, as well as archival material from both the city of Brooklyn and the poets’ personal collections. The suite debuted at National Sawdust on June 10, 2023.