Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Storm Country is an immersive headphone play designed to accompany an exploratory journey through Ithaca's West End. Co-written by Ithaca artists Nick Salvato and Aoise Stratford, Storm Country plunges listeners into a soundscape of voices, music, and environments as they encounter the histories and ghosts of Ithaca's Cayuga Inlet and its surroundings.  The play kicks off the the Cherry Arts 2016-17 season beginning September 9th.

Storm Country marks the Ithaca area's first exploration of the 'headphone play:' an experimental theatrical genre, emergent over the last decade, in which combinations of voice, ambient sound, and movement guide audiences through a layered experience of a place. Innovating within this exciting form, Storm Country interweaves the geographical and historical truths of Ithaca's West End withTess of the Storm Country, an iconic fiction of this part of the city.

A 1909 pulp novel written by Ithaca native Grace Miller White and set in the city's West End, Tess of the Storm Country is a melodramatic story of class struggle between squatter fishermen and their wealthy neighbors. The novel and its fiery heroine, Tessibel Skinner, captured the imaginations and hearts of the entire country and was adapted multiple times for the screen, including two silent films starring Mary Pickford. While blending fact and fiction, Storm Country explores issues that remain as vital in today's Ithaca as they are in the novel: finding home and being denied it, trespassing and security, the power of the water to transform and be transformed.

The creative team for Storm Country is:

• Text: Nick Salvato & Aoise Stratford
• Direction: Samuel Buggeln
• Sound design: Norm Scott
• Music: Anna Coogan voice
• Actors: Brianna Ford, Carolyn Goelzer, Jennifer Herzog, Kathleen Mulligan, Dean Robinson, David Studwell, Jacob Garrett White

Storm Country will run September 9th–11th and 16th–18th. Scheduled walking times are between 4:00 and 6:00 on Fridays and 1:00 and 6:00 on Saturdays and Sundays.

Storm Country involves a walk of about one mile over the course of seventy minutes, punctuated by several stops to sit and reflect. The walk begins at the Lookout Point of Erie Barge Canal at the tip of Ithaca's Inlet Island and finishes at 102 Cherry Street, about a 15-minute walk back to the origin point.

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