"She was taking a break from tech rehearsals for the latest production of one of those shows, "Oratorio for Living Things," at the Signature Theatre. Inspired by, as she puts it, "the three Carls"-Sagan, Orff, and (Carlo) Rovelli-"Oratorio" is a musical meditation, for twelve singers, on time, memory, and what it means to be human on a turbulent planet at the edge of cataclysm."
""We can't understand it because we are made of it." She has a darting, birdlike keenness, and as she weaved through a pack of slower-moving fellow-humans into the Hayden Planetarium, for a showing of "Encounters in the Milky Way" (narrated by Pedro Pascal), she went on, "I think I've always been chasing mystery-looking into questions that are not built to be answered. And that just tickles me. I think that's part of being alive.""
Heather Christian is a forty-four-year-old composer, librettist, and performer known for ineffable musical theatre pieces with a cult following. She received a MacArthur Fellowship and moves easily between scientific spaces and theatrical rehearsal. Her work 'Oratorio for Living Things' is scored for twelve singers and meditates on time, memory, and human meaning amid planetary turbulence, drawing inspiration from Sagan, Orff, and Rovelli. Christian frames time as mysterious, subjective, and intrinsic to human identity. Her performance persona blends Southern roots with a birdlike intensity, and her creative practice pursues unanswerable questions and the sensations of wonder.
Read at The New Yorker
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