New Film Release – "The Forest" w/ Echoes Amplification

The Forest

A New Film from The Crossing

w/ Echoes Amplification

“Something that couldn’t have been imagined in other time and is fully

realized on a high level.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Thanksgiving week.

Pause.

Take a walk with us in

The Forest.

In thanks for the community of The Crossing and the many of us who will spend the holiday separated from friends and family, we offer our new film, The Forest. The film was created by our friends Four/Ten Media and Crossing in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez, using binaural (360º) audio capture and a single, continuous take in which the camera lens is the eye of the observer, moving leisurely through the work.

Overcoming the inability of choirs to safely sing together in conventional ways, The Forest features the 24 singers of The Crossing performing along a trail at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope, Pennsylvania, situated in the sounds and sights of the woods, and captured live at our October 2020 socially distant, sold-out performances.

We give thanks: for trees, for imagination, for singing, for words.

(And we give thanks for Jim Primosch, just hearing we’ve received our 6th Grammy nomination in 5 consecutive years – for Carthage, a collection of his music! More on that later.)

Read the full libretto for The Forest here.

The Forest focuses on the symbiotic relationship between individual trees and the forest – a metaphor for the relationship between each singer and the ensemble. The libretto is formed from The Crossing singers’ reflections on their isolation during COVID-Time, overlaid with texts from Scott Russell Sanders’ essay Mind in the Forest. The music was composed by Donald and Kevin, with a musical reference to a work by Lansing McLoskey. The Forest experience was available by reservation only, entering at timed intervals in family pods (1-4 people), with two-minute buffers between each group. Pods walked along a prescribed trail, in a loop that did not require them to double back across other audience members or singers.

The Forest saw the premiere of The Crossing’s new amplification system, Echoes, developed by sound designer Paul Vazquez, to present newly-commissioned works in accordance with social distancing guidelines. Echoes allowed the singers to stand and safely sing 30 feet from each other and from the audience while listeners walked along a well-worn, mostly flat path of approximately .3 miles lined with speakers. Though the work captures the isolation of singers during the pandemic, Echoes paradoxically allowed the experience to be intimate and personal. The 25-minute, intimate experience reestablishes those currently-broken relationships between singers and audience members, and tells The Crossing’s story – a story of a planet in crisis, its people and its forests in peril, and yet, in that curiously human way, a story of hope and a way forward.

photos by John C. Hawthorne

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