The Hundred Windows

Mount Hope World Singers  with Christine A. Banna and Logan Barrett

🖥️ Watch Saturday, June 7, recording (official video)

🖥️ Watch Thursday, June 5, recording (unedited wide shot)

📻 Hear Annika Bentley discuss the show on WAYO 104.3 FM's "Mouth Sounds."

📺 Watch Christine Banna and conductor Brian White chat about the show — and preview its animation — on FOX Rochester.

📖 Read CITY Magazine's article in which arts reporter Patrick Hosken calls this "a bold concert with a staggering scope."

Mount Hope World Singers, in collaboration with visual artist Christine Banna and composer Logan Barrett, is thrilled to present The Hundred Windows, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of the senses featuring 12 choral works from around the globe, a quadraphonic electronic soundscape, and projected animations. Both the soundscape and projections will be live-mixed, making each performance unique.

The show is inspired by the umwelt, a term coined in the 1930s by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and by Ed Yong’s beautiful non-fiction book on this subject, An Immense World. An umwelt is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems. 

Senses featured in The Hundred Windows include sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, echolocation, electroreception, magnetoreception, nociception (pain), proprioception (self in space), thermoreception (heat/cold), equilibrioception (balance), and extrasensory perception (ESP). 

The Hundred Windows features choral works from Malaysia, Haiti, South Africa, Norway, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, China, Ecuador, the United States, Canada, and the Ute people; the languages the chorus will be singing in include Malaysian, Haitian Creole, Xhosa, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Latin. Two of the songs are in untranslated indigenous languages, two feature neutral syllables in lieu of words, and two are in English.

The song order is programmed to form a figurative ouroboros (the snake that eats its own tail), symbolizing a cycle through birth, life, death, and rebirth, and referencing the circular nature of our sensory bubbles.

The set for The Hundred Windows was created in reference to a metaphor offered by Jakob von Uexküll in his original monograph. This metaphor describes our consciousness as a house filled with windows, overlooking a garden which represents the wild and beautiful information of the universe around us. The way we construct and experience reality is dependent on what kind of windows we possess, how many there are, and how those windows interact.

All performances were ASL interpreted. There were latex-free balloons available, enabling audience members to feel sonic vibrations with their hands. Audience members were able to manipulate the pre- and post-show soundscape themselves using an interactive Xbox controller. 

link to The Hundred Windows Academy of Medicine program

link to The Hundred Windows Sklarsky Glassbox Theater & JCC Hart Theater program 

"remarkable" ⭐ "stimulating" ⭐ "unexpected" ⭐ "wonderfully immersive" ⭐ "a must-see"

"a wonderfully complex and beautiful show" –David Raymond, Rochester Beacon

"an inspiring reminder of the power that art can hold" –Felicia Swartzenberg, RIT