“Situation Report”
Music by Ronnie Kuller
Text by Alicia Jo Rabins
Featuring
Emmy Bean, alto
Ronnie Kuller, piano
This performance was a finalist in the 3rd Annual Chicago songSLAM, co-presented by Fourth Coast Ensemble and Spark & Wiry Cries on April 3, 2022.
The performance was recorded at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston, IL. Video by SnoStudios. Audio by FermataLab.
“Situation Report”
The yard has become an ice-planet.
The rosemary coated in crystal armor.
Everything different and the same.
I once wrote, “An ice planet
Can only be entered alone,”
Or something like that.
And I think of this as I navigate
The moon-yard in my boots,
Sliding a little, cracking, breaking through.
I still think it true,
Ice is solitude made material,
I am not the person I was,
Even my words wear the crystal
Armor so that I am not embarrassed To quote myself,
This ice planet being a place
Where I regard my former life
With a distant affection,
As an astronaut
Looks through a porthole
At the small green planet
Where she used to live.
RONNIE KULLER is a Chicago-based composer, arranger, pianist, and accordionist. Some highlights of her musical career include playing accordion onstage with the Joffrey Ballet, collaborating with the Chicago Sinfonietta, and performing as the piano accompanist for Mister Tom Musick. She has written for the Chicago Film Archives, the BBE, Opera-Matic, the Neo-Futurists, Gaudete Brass, and Mucca Pazza. Her music has been featured on critically acclaimed television shows, recorded onto wax cylinder, and played at the Ear Taxi Festival.
EMMY BEAN is a singer, mover and performer. Her interdisciplinary work combines improvisation, conversation, folk tunes, narrative, poetic inquiry, political urgency and embodied expression. She writes songs and performs both as a soloist and with 80 Foots and Ida May. She performed in Facility Theater’s Little Match Girl Passion and created sound and music for their production of Phoebe in Winter. Her solo show You’re His Child has been seen at the Pivot Arts Festival and Rhino Fest here in Chicago. She holds a masters degree in Interdisciplinary Art from Columbia College Chicago.
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One Response
Amazing! l love your music Ronnie, and Emmy’s voice is so soft and beautiful . It is like listening to a clear stream finding its way amongst soft grass under blue sky with feathery light clouds here and there.