Ocean Body is a 4-screen, multi-channel sound installation that explores the potential of interracial coalition through the deep yet tenuous bonds of a friendship. The work is a collaboration between Helga Davis, Mark DeChiazza and Shara Nova.

Song, found text, conversations, and new compositions by Davis and Nova merge with DeChiazza’s original footage of the two women together and alone in the waters of the Gulf Coast, to create a multi-sensory experience of a place where sand, sun, and water, surround experiences of intense communion and also of profound isolation. Diptych cinematic imagery makes beautifully visceral the impossibility of an easily, shared truth, presenting imperfectly parallel viewpoints that might sometimes frame a subject similarly, but will never match. The imagery represents Davis and Nova interconnected within a sculptural dress built for two, by artist Annica Cuppetelli. Tethered, the two cannot avoid affecting each other, as the actions of one will move, confine, support, or even wholly re-shape the other. Ocean Body examines the sometimes conflicting needs for union and autonomy within a friendship, and the how we continually discover each other in new and transformational ways.

Ocean Body

The Artists

Shara Nova is the founder of the chamber pop band My Brightest Diamond. She has composed works for yMusic, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, Brooklyn Rider, Nadia Sirota and Roomful of Teeth, among others. Her orchestrations have been performed by the North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and the BBC Concert orchestra. Her baroque chamber opera You Us We All premiered in the US at BAM Next Wave Festival in 2015. Nova is a Kresge Fellow, Knights Grant recipient, and a United States Artists fellow.

Helga Davis is a vocalist and performance artist with feet planted on the most prestigious international stages and with firm roots in her local community. Davis was principal actor in the 25th-anniversary international revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's seminal opera Einstein on the Beach. She is artist in residence at National Sawdust and Joe’s Pub, host of the eponymous podcast HELGA on WQXR, winner of the 2019 Greenfield Prize in composition, a 2019 Alpert Award finalist, and the 2018-21 visiting curator for the performing arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Mark DeChiazza is a director whose multifaceted practice encompasses filmmaking, choreography, scenic and media design, and installation. His work has been presented in national and international venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, John F. Kennedy Center of the Arts, Guthrie Theater, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Les Subsistances, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and many more. He first collaborated with Shara Nova in 2019, when they co-created the massive outdoor music-performance work Look Around, celebrating Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s 125th anniversary season, featuring over 600 performers from over 30 local groups

Press

“An arresting piece of beauty and serenity; something in limited supply these days…Go see it.”– Operawire

“The score while surrounded by ocean images offered a fleeting sense of open-air liberation.”– The Wall Street Journal

“Ocean Body,” is a gesture toward reflection on distance and communion.”-The New York Times