Bird Lady is a multimedia piece inspired by the photography of Vivian Maier.  Each of the dancers — Liz Burritt, Rebecca Salzer and Kristina Fluty — picked one of her photos: a worried-looking woman in a public phone booth; a woman with a cane and an intense stare in a small, half-dead urban garden; a couple standing by the entrance to a subway station, the man with an amorous expression and the woman with an affronted one.  They wrote monologues imagining what might have been going on in these womens' minds at the moment Maier photographed them, and created vocabularies of movement based on the shapes and positions of their bodies.  They appear both on stage and in projected videos designed by Anna Johnson Ryndová, while Alina Bokovikova's costume designs reflect the way clothing could act as a shield in a more formal era.  

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My music also alludes to that era.  I took tiny fragments of public-domain film scores from the 1950s and 60s, and stretched them out until seconds became minutes.  I created short electronic gestures that allude to the experimental electronic music of the period.  I made Max patch that generated bursts of scattered sounds and fed it both of the above plus recordings of rustling leaves, high-heeled footsteps and clinking glasses in a bar.  Finally, I wrote a pastiche of Miles Davis circa Kind of Blue, recorded it with Michael Jones on trumpet and Thaddeus Tukes on piano, and submerged it under floating layers of fragmented sound.