Kate Sutton-Johnson

Sounds Inside

Writer/director: Kate Sutton-Johnson

Assistant director/choreographer: Cat Brindisi

Dance consultant: Tamara Ober

Sound designer: Kevin Springer

Composer: Aaron Gabriel

Stage manager: Alyssa Isaacson

Performers: Kim Kivens, Dexieng Yang, Dana Lee Thompson, Vinecia Coleman

Sounds Inside is a new movement and text-based performance piece led by writer/director/designer Kate Sutton-Johnson. In a dreamlike space, an amplified world of strange patterns and repetitions emerges, and we see multiple women experiencing disconnection and overwhelm. Absurd and irreverent, intense and dark; a nearly indecipherable media and technological landscape begins to unfold. From inside a labyrinth-like puzzle of language and fragmented memories, we see these women gradually begin to map their way back to their deepest sources of power—grounded in the earth, in relationality and in meaning. The world shapeshifts—it quiets and expands—and intimate, personal mythologies make way for a vast wilderness of feminine power.

Kate Sutton-Johnson is a theater-maker, creative director, writer, and 3D designer specializing in performative events, speculative design and immersive installations. Kate holds a BFA in set design from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and she has been recognized with numerous awards, from the Twin City’s Iveys to USA Today’s top 10 lists. She has designed dozens of shows locally and nationally, and her credits include contemporary dramas, classical theater, large-scale musicals, devised work and everything in between. Additionally, Kate works extensively in the museum world; conceptualizing experiential exhibits that focus on natural history, anthropology, science, ethnography, archaeology and conservation. www.ksjdesignstudio.com 

Ritika Ganguly

Eye am hear

Concept, voice, composition, sound design: Ritika Ganguly

Visualization, projection, set design: Zoe Cinel 

Sound visualizer building: Chris Delisle

Audio engineering: Shinjan Sengupta

What secret is at stake when one truly listens? What wider world does sound bring to the surface? How does a sound come to be designated as “noise”? How [and to whom or to what] do we attribute noisiness? Can we see silence, or the act of silencing? Using a combination of live singing, lasers, environmental scans, their smells and shadows, this piece explores the tether between sound and home, incomprehensible cacophony and enforced silence.

Ritika Ganguly, Ph.D., is a Minneapolis-based composer and anthropologist born and raised in New Delhi, India. She has trained in genres within Bengali music and contemporary Indian musical theater. She is committed to vocabulary-building of South Asian folk music in the Twin Cities and her work often comments on western stereotypes of South Asian musical genres and practices. When not composing or consulting, she can be found coaching her students in voice culture, ear-training, deep listening, and expressive vocalizing. Her vocal, compositional, and coaching work pushes us to rely less on music notation and theory, and more on audiative practices that deepen our aptitude to hear and express. Ritika has been awarded several grants for her research and musical work in Baul (Bengali Sufi music/poetry.) She was recently commissioned by the Minnesota Opera to compose a mini opera in Bengali/Bangla Xylem. Ritika is a 2021 McKnight Composers Fellow at the American Composers Forum. She is a loose, long-leaf tea enthusiast and has an impulse to connect with people over cha (tea). https://ritikagangulymusic.com/