MALVERN, PA — The Wharton Esherick Museum (WEM) has announced the opening of The Wood is Singing in Color, a new site-responsive performance by WEM’s 2023 Artist-in-Residence, acclaimed artist Martha McDonald. In this immersive piece, McDonald activates handmade costumes and wooden set elements through original music, lyrics, and choreography, reframing our understanding of Wharton Esherick and his creative legacy. Each aspect of the work reflects McDonald’s research into Esherick’s creative output and influences in the 1920s and 1930s, including his expressionistic stage sets for Hedgerow Theatre, experience with avant-garde rhythmic dance, prismatic furniture, and interest in anthroposophy, a holistic philosophy developed by Rudolph Steiner.
The Wood is Singing in Color marks the first live performance by a WEM Artist-in-Residence, a program the museum began in 2021 to invite meaningful conversation between contemporary makers and the museum’s collections. To develop the performance, McDonald conducted a series of residency stays on WEM’s campus throughout 2023 to explore the collections and archives, including boxes of Esherick’s watercolors, sketches, and letters, as well as photographs and ephemera. McDonald drew directly from her discovery of Esherick’s handwritten notes for the lyrics to several of the songs created for the performance.
“Esherick isn’t known as a writer, but I was struck by how lyrical his notes to himself were,” McDonald says. “Many were meditations on the natural world around his studio—the changing colors of leaves in Autumn, ‘the call of a lonely buck deer.’ Others explored self-doubt and isolation. They seemed to call out to be song lyrics.”
McDonald was the first artist-in-residence to stay overnight in Esherick’s family farmhouse Sunekrest, part of WEM’s larger campus, so that she might experience the landscape as embodied, sensory research. McDonald’s exploration also extended beyond WEM’s campus. She and collaborator Brooke Sietinsons traveled to the anthroposophical community of Spring Valley, New York to learn elements of eurythmy, Steiner’s expressive movement art that seeks to make speech and music visible through gesture and color. McDonald worked with a series of collaborators, including musicians Sietinsons and Miriam Goldberg, fashion designer Dana Meyer, and woodworker Casey Chew to integrate all of this inquiry into The Wood is Singing in Color. Additional elements were commissioned from woodworker Larissa Huff.
During one of the key moments of The Wood is Singing in Color, McDonald wears Prismatic Cape, an elaborate costume that reflects the angular asymmetry of some of Esherick’s most iconic furniture. During the performance, Prismatic Cape seems to consume her body with the power of these irregular, faceted shapes. To create this garment, McDonald and collaborator Dana Meyer looked to Japanese pattern-making techniques that build dimensional angular shapes through precise pressing and seaming to create dynamic movement. McDonald also drew her color palette for several costumes from Esherick’s Painting of a Dancer.
“Before I started researching, I had a very simplified idea of Esherick as this heroic American woodworker. Then I saw a photo of him in a diaphanous Greek shift, dancing with a group of women on the lawn of a dance camp in the Adirondacks in 1920 and I thought, ‘Oh, now this is exciting!’ I felt like I was peeling back the layers of the Esherick onion,” McDonald says.
Martha McDonald: The Wood is Singing in Color will be staged in Esherick’s 1956 Workshop co-designed with Louis I. Kahn and Anne Tyng. An accompanying installation exploring McDonald’s residency research and a costume made for the performance will be shown in WEM’s Visitor Center from September 14, 2023 – December 30, 2023.
Performance Dates & Times:
- September 23 – 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm
- September 24 – 1:00 pm
- November 11 – 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm
- November 12 – 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm
For performance details and to book tickets visit https://whartonesherickmuseum.org/events/list/.
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