Stuart Bender

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Visitations

Anza Borrego, a music/video evocation of the timeless constancy and ceaseless mutability of the desert, is a section of a large-scale video-oratorio, Visitations, which engages the notions of vision and hallucination as generators of political revolutions.

Linking historical events with sacred texts and language, the audience is positioned to interpret and question divine events in the context of very secular episodes throughout history.

In Anza Borrego, the hushed and halting harmonies of the electronic soundtrack underpin a static desert image, which swims in and out of hallucinogenic transformations, as solid rock melts into an open cave, which disappears into a barren path, out of which shines a burning sun that dissolves the land into clouds and sky.

With the inner image in a continual state of flux, while the outer image remains constant, Anza Borrego elicits the simultaneous impressions of permanence and change, of past and future, of reality and illusion, and stands as a poetic evocation of the southern California desert after which it is named.

| - - Program Notes - - | | - - Visions Magazine Review - - |