NYU and UCI: Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope

In September 2001 as performing artists and collaborative arts engineers were working on a joint performance about Cassandra between the two institutions, the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed.

This was a devastating blow and for a few weeks the collaborators at NYU felt they were in a war zone, and collaborators at UCI had experienced the devastation through the media and our exchanges. Our first inclination was to cancel our production of Cassandra and the Internet2 experiment. However, after some exchanges and discussion, the collaborators decided to honor the victims of the attack and investigate the feelings and responses through a collaboration for a production, Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope.

This resulted in a production that pioneered collaborative structure and improvisation through the medium of Internet2. This production was the first large scale production of improvised and processed works with performing artists utilizing and respond to the materials of each other in real time at two locations to two different audiences, east coast and west coast.