Welcome to “In Music and in Life”, an experimental music endeavor by Sara Lydia Anne Banks and the Intimate Artistry String Quartet. This evening is a sneak preview for their debut season of new work in the Spring.

The program is a collection of emotionally immersive musical improvisations conceived of by composer Sara Lydia Anne Banks (aka Lydia Love) and brought to life by the Intimate Artistry String Quartet, with members Charlotte Munn-Wood, Lara Lewison, Lauren Siess, and Polina Bakhtina. Banks will also contribute some solo cello improvisations interspersed throughout the evening.

The audience’s experience builds from a place of embodiment and catharsis as opposed to analysis and a preoccupation for intellectual understanding. This musical language is designed to use the parameters of tension and discomfort as the locus for storytelling. In order to go on that emotional journey with the musicians, the listener must tune into that wavelength of discomfort; breathing through the pain and raw human feelings along with the performers.

To best facilitate this environment of empathetic embodiment, the audience is guided through a basic mindfulness exercise. In between each piece, the audience and performers share reflections of the emotional journey they experienced. That conversation then informs the next improvisation.

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The performance on the 12th is a sneak preview works-in-progress style event. We are bursting at the seams to share this extraordinary thing we’ve been incubating for two years! But some parts of music only exist with an audience. Come show us what the rest of this magic looks like!

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The venue where we’ll be hosting all this magic is the historic WOW Cafe Theater, a women and trans theater collective founded by anarchist lesbian squatters in 1980. This extraordinary organization elevates art-for-the-sake-of-art in a way that resists capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy like nothing else I’ve ever come across. They deserve all your love, respect, and most of all financial support. Beacons of hope like WOW are rare but still exist! We literally fight on the front lines day-after-day, decade-after-decade, for the need to bolster marginalized voices in the performing arts. It has been and will always be my second home.

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