Elori Saxl: Before Blue video premiere

Monday, February 1, 6pm video premiere on YouTube, 6-8pm projected on Cowles Center for Dance, downtown Minneapolis
In partnership with Cowles Center for Dance and Street Factory Media

Video still from Before Blue

The Great Northern is honored to present the video premiere of the single Before Blue from composer Elori Saxl’s upcoming album, choreographed and directed by "beguiling" (New York Times) choreographer Emma Portner and dancer Justin Dejager. An associated interview explores how Saxl’s work contemplates and celebrates the Northwoods, how one particularly challenging winter led to creative breakthroughs, and why “being there” still matters. Both can be viewed on this event page February 1. A large-scale rendering of the video will happen on the exterior of the Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis. Visitors to that site can stream the music (Before Blue) on their own devices as they take in the projected visuals.

Saxl creates music and film projects that explore how technology influences our relationship to land, patterns of communication, and capacity for empathy. Her new album The Blue of Distance (releasing January 22 on Western Vinyl) elegantly combines digitally-processed recordings of wind and water with the rich sounds of analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra. Half-written in the verdant Adirondack mountains of northern New York in a hot summer filled with love, ecstasy, and a feeling of promise, and half-written in the frozen Apostle Islands in Lake Superior in the dead of winter looking back at videos from the summer, The Blue of Distance effortlessly captures the gentle sorrows of nostalgia in an age of perpetual digital memory.

View the video online here on our website, Facebook, YouTube, or projected onto the Cowles Center.

Read an interview with Elori Saxl by Trever Hagen on The Great Northern Blog.

Elori Saxl by Alex Munro