Chalk And Soot
Born out of a close collaboration with choreographer John Heginbotham and his company Dance Heginbotham, Chalk and Soot is a song cycle by our dear Colin that uses text from a book of prose poetry and woodcut illustrations by the painter Wassily Kandinsky called Klange (Sounds). With vocalists Shara Nova (of My Brightest Diamond) and Gabriel Kahane as muses, Colin sets the absurd, colorful, figurative, and pastoral scenes of Kandinsky’s proto-Dadaist poetry from 1912 (during the time of the Der Blaue Reiter – inspiration for our quartet’s name) in an eclectic manner, mirroring the diverse artistic inspirations of Kandinsky and his circle of artists that also included composer Arnold Schoenberg.