DESCRIPTION:
Imagery by Kathy O'Connor, Rachel Bishop, Rebecca Van Tassell, and Joshua Groffman.
Film edited by Joshua Groffman.
Text written and performed by Sarah Heady.
Music by Joshua Groffman.

"An arrow pointed down" was conceived in response to a text by the poet Sarah Heady (www.sarahheady.com), with whom I’ve collaborated on several pieces:

"The Hudson is an arrow pointing down (though it flows both ways). The City is a poured-concrete floor onto which all things land, and sometimes break. You can hold—with your hands raised above your head, with a system of pulleys, with a net, standing on a ladder—your life and all its parts in the air.

But there is the fact of gravity."

As part of a project staged by One Quiet Plunge (www.onequietplunge.wordpress.com), four sets of composers and visual artists worked together to create fifteen minute pieces that responded to Sarah’s text and to the idea of the Hudson River as a shaping force in the physical and human geography of life in the Hudson Valley. In performance, "An arrow pointed down" uses three screens and electronics performed in real-time; each of the four music-visual pairings are presented without break to create a concert-length multi-media work. The video you’ll see here is a seven-minute edit of the original version of my segment, with fixed media accompaniment.