Winter Sound Garden

The Winter Sound Garden is last in a series of free* outdoor, self-guided “pop-up” events along West River Parkway in Minneapolis that began with the SPRING Sound Garden in May 2021. Each Sound Garden event features a temporary sound installation of 50+ small, battery-powered remote speakers distributed throughout the park, each playing a different part of the larger piece of music, creating a multi-layered, immersive experience. The sound installation is then accompanied by live roving musicians and dancers, with site-specific poetry and visual art elements embedded throughout the installation. The site-specific movement score was collaboratively designed by dancers Leslie O’Neill, Erika Hansen, Sarah Baumert, and Megan Mayer. The Winter Sound Garden will also feature a special parallel site-specific performance score by SuperGroup. 

These seasonal Sound Garden events are designed as durational, self-guided experiences, intended for audiences to connect more meaningfully to a particular place and the natural world. The spatial sound score and live dance and musical elements are meant to accompany the sounds and physical elements that are already there - the birds, the trees, the wind, the crunching snow. Audiences are encouraged to both circulate and linger, at their own pace, following their own impulses for what to pay attention to. The immersive, multi-layered experience is intentionally designed without any fixed focal points, instead inviting participants and audience alike to allow moments to unfold in their own personal way - noticing a particular bird call or a tree trunk, a perspective or a memory - things that may have been previously overlooked or hidden, covered up or forgotten.

The WINTER SOUND GARDEN is one of four parts that first premiered in 2018, at four different outdoor locations around Minnesota. Each seasonal Sound Garden in the Water Suite was composed for one of the four seasons, and for a specific site that was on or adjacent to a significant body of water, inspired by the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. In response to the pandemic and limitations on live performance venues and gatherings in 2021, Wavelets Creative re-mounted all four parts of the Water Suite along West River Parkway in Minneapolis as free, distanced, “pop-up” events that require advance reservations in order for audience to receive exact location and other important details about each event, and in order to maintain capacity limits and the larger intentions of the work. 

*Free, but reservations required: register here