Production by Ridge Theater

Music composed by Michael Gordon, with text by Emily Dickinson

Directed by Bob McGrath

Commissioned by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston,
and by BAM for the 2008 Next Wave Festival.

Emily Dickinson discovered entire worlds within her imagination. Discerning the gears of the cosmos in the everyday, Dickinson created a new landscape of the interior in writings rich with wonder and fierce with longing. It's an intriguing duality that forms the heart of Lightning at our feet, a multimedia song cycle inspired by the poems of Dickinson from composer Michael Gordon and Ridge Theater—the creative team behind Decasia (2001). Setting her poems to music and motion, Gordon and Ridge create an environment of restless creativity; transformed by Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder's projections, rolling screens form rooms onstage both real and metaphoric.

Under Bob McGrath's direction with dramaturgy by Daniel Zippi, four contemporary women channel the poet as they pore over poems, write songs, and contemplate mortality, while receiving dispatches from a distant war. Together, these collaborators create a theatrical prose poem that re-imagines Dickinson's words as songs for our time.

These performances are made possible by the W. Ford Schumann ’50 Endowment for the Arts and the Lipp Family Fund for Performing Artists.