"This relatively capacious house has also been transformed, this time by set designer Kristen Robinson... It’s like an operating theater, with a paper structure suspended low in the middle where the body might be. This soft, lobed object glows — it looks like Isamu Noguchi’s version of an atom. Director Lee Sunday Evans puts the band behind the high back row, and the singers spend most of the oratorio walking up and down the stairs all around us. They are almost always facing that central lamp. If it is a nucleus, they are the electrons in its orbit, moving from valence to valence…The Oratorio for Living Things uses music to dissolve the listeners into their fundamental particles, then uses simple choreography and intimate eye contact to reorganize us. We have spent so much of the last two years being thrown centrifugally out of our own systems — so Oratorio puts you into the middle of one, and spins you back into place." - Helen Shaw, Vulture, 2022

"The Oratorio for Living Things uses music to dissolve the listeners into their fundamental particles, then uses simple choreography and intimate eye contact to reorganize us. We have spent so much of the last two years being thrown centrifugally out of our own systems — so Oratorio puts you into the middle of one, and spins you back into place...Tightly packed in the small, steep, egg-shaped bowl designed for the space by Kristen Robinson, six instrumentalists and 12 singers make music there that shakes the 100 audience members like a 90-minute earthquake...

this is not concert music. The production, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, highlights thematic cohesion and theatricality even without a traditional story. Both the set and the performers are draped in varieties of deep-space blue, as if to suggest a shared chemistry between people and their environment. (The beautiful costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) The sound (by Nick Kourtides) and lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) are likewise saturated, picking out voices and faces — great ones to begin with — to emphasize the shifting dynamic of individuals and groups...

Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year.” The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: “We’re all embarrassed,” they say.

But I — who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation — was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one’s thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in “Oratorio for Living Things,” Christian provides the notes but your body is the song."

- Jesse Green, New York Times, 2022

Ars Nova, 2022

Composer: Heather Christian

Director Lee Sunday Evans

Music Director Ben Moss

Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson

Costume Designer: Máiran Talán De La Rosa´

Lighting Designer: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew

Sound Designer: Nick Kourtides

Latin Translation & Latin Consultant: Greg Taubman

Stage Manager: Jo Fernandez

Assistant Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian

Photography: Ben Arons Kristen Robinson

Associate Director Keenan Tyler Oliphant

Assistant Director Liza Couser

Assoc. Music Director: Jacklyn Riha

CARBON