Choral Arts Initiative Explores Exile, Nature and Healing with 'Transformation'

Kristina M. Garcia
1 day ago
4 min read

Newport Beach's Choral Arts Initiative nears its season’s end on Sunday with its performance of ‘Transformation,’ featuring Gabriel Jackson’s ‘Exile Meditations’ and Anne Dudley’s ‘One Touch of Nature.’

Gabriel Jackson's 'Exile Meditations' will be opening the program as a seven-movement production exploring 'exile, longing and the quest for identity,' according to the Choral Arts Initiative website. Photo courtesy of Choral Arts Initiative

As Newport Beach’s Choral Arts Initiative nears the end of its 13th season, the nonprofit vocal music organization is venturing through stories of “displacement, nature and renewal,” with emotionally rich text and choir for its performance of “Transformation” on Sunday.

“Transformation” will feature the works of Gabriel Jackson with his United States premiere of “Exile Meditations,” as well as Anne Dudley and her world premiere of “One Touch of Nature” as part of the season’s overarching theme “Metamorphosis: Transformation and Renewal.”

Opening the program is Jackson’s “Exile Meditations,” which is a seven-movement production exploring “exile, longing and the quest for identity,” according to the Choral Arts Initiative website.

Founder and Artistic Director Brandon Elliot describes the piece as poignant and stunning as it grabs texts in English and Latvian, channeling the experiences of various poets and their encounters with exile.

“(The production) takes these different poets that are speaking from their lived experience of exile, of being forced to be taken away from their homeland, from their country, and treated like cattle,” Elliot said. “Even though this is based on historical scenarios in the Baltic region, it's so relevant today, this concept of being taken from your home.”

The program opens with a whistle, which Elliot relates back to 20th century Europe during the Soviet Union where the sound of a railway whistle was “a source of immediate trauma,” he said.

“It was the sound that you heard when you knew you were going to be forcibly removed from your home-sort-of country, put on a train and shipped away. It's a really striking way to go right into the drama and the sorrow of the entire piece,” Elliot added.

Another significant movement in the piece is when there is one single rhythmic strike on a brake drum paired along with the text to describe burying bodies in the earth and the sense of soil crushing onto the body.

Choral Arts Initiative's vocal artists. Photo courtesy of Choral Arts Initiative

Following Jackson’s piece will be Dudley’s “One Touch of Nature,” which is a six-movement piece reflecting on the “healing and unifying power of the natural world,” according to the website.

A small bit of text that recurs in the piece is, “Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do?” Serving as the musical anchor for the audience, it’s a constant reminder about protecting our climate and our world.

“(‘Exile Meditations’ is) an interesting way to open the program because we present the program with this piece first, which is really stark. It's sad, it's languishing, a thinly transition to the hope, to the aspirations of nature (in ‘One Touch of Nature),” Elliot said.

Elliot waited years to program “Exile Meditations” because he was still searching for the perfect companion piece to complement it. It was when he saw the following lines in Dudley’s piece that a switch flipped and he realized that he finally found his missing link.

“How far are we from home? Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do?”

Connecting with Jackson’s text: “Where should birds fly after the last sky? All I had brought with me from home / Is a handful of soil. That yearning for your free homeland ... can only be quietly felt and endured.”

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public was forced to be enclosed in their own spaces due to stay-at-home requirements, travel restrictions and the closure of many public spaces, including national parks.

But as public spaces began to open back up, national parks saw record attendance with 44 parks setting a record in 2021 for recreation visits, according to the National Parks Service website. When people felt isolated and unsure of the future, many individuals turned to nature to find their peace and comfort.

“We can't just sit with this feeling of exile, this feeling of loneliness and hopelessness, so we turn to nature. And this piece by Anne Dudley also instills optimism and to look at what we're doing to our planet, but there's still hope,” Elliot said.

He continued, “There's still beauty in nature that can transform our lives. So I do think that they speak to everyone’s lived experience and that we've all had to turn to nature at some point to seek comfort, to seek solace.”

As the season nears its end and Choral Arts Initiative prepares for season 14, Elliot is feeling optimistic, hopeful and excited for the future. When Elliot founded this organization, he had a five-year plan and was wondering if it would even be possible for the organization to last five years at all.

“(Being) at season 13, there's a sense of awe, there's a sense of humility, there's a sense of gratitude,” he said. “And it just emboldens me and it emboldens all of us at CAI to keep going and to keep going better, to keep growing, to keep thriving for reaching our vision of being a world-class destination for new choral music.”

With season 14 and 15 around the corner, the primary inspiration for this season’s theme of “Metamorphosis: Transformation and Renewal” is thinking ahead for what’s next with Choral Arts.

“This season and next season are sort of hinting at what's to come at season 15, so it's sort of deliberately taking steps toward our season 15 theme,” Elliot said. “It sounds so daunting to just kind of leave it at that. But we'll be releasing more info about season 15 later.”