VIDEO: Check Out a Teaser for DACAMERA's Upcoming Presentation of THE DEPARTING LANDSCAPE

DACAMERA's Fall 2020 season of online concerts, curated by Artistic Director Sarah Rothenberg, continues this month with The Departing Landscape, a unique collaboration with filmmaker John Carrithers. The Departing Landscape premieres on Tuesday, November 17 (8 pm Eastern time), and is free with registration at dacamera.com. The stream will be available on demand for one week following the premiere.

Conceived by Rothenberg, The Departing Landscape features her performance of Morton Feldman's last piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), filmed in the Menil Collection's ancient gallery.

Rothenberg performs Feldman's sublime work surrounded by treasures dating back to 2800 B.C.E. - talismans of a distant past that inspired the composer, and which have survived to today. Juxtaposing views of the performer and the artifacts, the film has been edited to reflect the rhythms and structure of Palais de Mari, capturing the piece's rarefied atmosphere of suspended time.

Notes Rothenberg, "Feldman named the work after an ancient palace at Mari in Mesopotamia - now eastern Syria - which he had seen in an image at the Louvre in Paris. Rising out of the sands, the palace represented a mystical timelessness that permeates Feldman's music. Tragically, following years of war in Syria and deliberate destruction of archaeological treasures, the palace has now been reduced to rubble.

"Feldman often said that music is not the sound of the attack - the moment when a key is struck - but is what comes after, as the sound fades, 'leaving us rather than coming towards us.' He called it 'the departing landscape.'

"I see the film as memorializing both this current moment and the idea of transitory time. It has an elegiac mood, conceived and created during this unprecedented COVID pandemic. I think art is what can connect us during this time of isolation, it can reveal our common experience. Feldman's music speaks to us in this moment of suspended time. It hovers between the ancient relics, our fragile present, and the unknowns that lie ahead. It takes us somewhere larger than ourselves."

Following the livestream premiere, audiences are invited to join Sarah Rothenberg and the Menil Collection Curator of Collections Paul Davis and Director of Publications Joseph Newland in a live zoom discussion at approximately 8:35 pm Eastern time.