And you ghosts rise blue

Indigo Cook thesis
Indigo Cook (MFA in Dance '25)
Spring, 2025

DATE: February 12, 2025
LOCATION: von der Heyden Theater | Rubenstein Arts Center
TIME: 7:30pm

Indigo Cook presents And you ghosts rise blue – an experimental pasticcio opera in three acts. Join us for the evening as we weave movement, sound, and light to open a rift in the space-time continuum and call in voices past and future, real and unreal. The voices – sounding alongside a collaborative collective of dancers, musicians, poets, actors, and visual artists – form a ghostly chorus with whom we sing of the ephemeral, the infinite, and the im/possible.  

Artist’s Statement  
Cook’s research focuses on contemporary performance practices of Western experimental art in the 20th and 21st centuries and their application to interdisciplinary creative processes. This compositional approach draws on scores, methodologies, and poetics across a field of disciplinary practices and weaves them together into a scaffold from which to build new creative work. Performed collaboratively, the act of sourcing and scaffolding within a matrix of diverse disciplines and voices requires the creators to navigate and experiment together with concepts of translation, multiplicity, and realization. As an artistic methodology, this approach offers the possibility for richer, deeper, polyvocal work. As a collective practice, it can serve as a heuristic for language and community building.   
 
Cook’s thesis aims to experiment with this compositional methodology in the context of their own art-making practice. And you ghosts rise blue was built alongside and in conversation with a host of embodied and disembodied voices – both material artistic collaborators and immaterial spectres of lineage, influence, and poetic inspiration. It has been a rewarding and humbling process, and we look forward to sharing it with you.