MEDIATHEK

SUNKEN CATHEDRAL is a multimedia musical performance work by KoreanAmerican female composer, vocalist, and sound artist Bora Yoon exploring the subconscious and cultural ley lines of her Korean heritage, within her American and musical identity.

Inspired by architecture, and music’s relationship to space, SUNKEN CATHEDRAL utilizes Yoon’s unique approach as a site-specific composer to create and build a musical architecture and sonic journey through various rooms, corridors, chambers, and dream spaces on the theatrical stage, which serve as a metaphoric journey through memory and cultural identity.

Through a panoply of live instruments, found objects, visuals, and poetic narrative -- a live musical sound design score and performance piece is composed and performed, depicting a dynamic sonic narrative that accompanies and resonates the literary, emotional, and cultural space of each chapter. Instrumentation includes voice, viola, taps, theremin, found sounds from the venue stage, stethescope, contact mics, body sounds, metronomes, turntable, electronics, samples, field recordings, and Korean traditional drumming.

Elements have been carefully constructed with ease of touring in mind - utilizing light and moving image (rather than physical set design) to create a dynamic range of realms, and sense of place, so that instruments, performance and poetic narrative can come to the foreground. Collaborators include Vong Pak (Korean Traditional drumming and dance), Tom Lee (production design), Adam Larsen (video design), and director Glynis Rigsby.

The music of SUNKEN CATHEDRAL was released in April 2014 on music label INNOVA (label of the American Composers Forum). Work-in-progress performances and workshops to develop the staging of the score were supported and developed as part of the HERE Arts Residency Program (HARP), New York's Park Avenue Armory, and the Singapore Arts Festival.

The ultimate goal with this performance is to create a sense of an architectural and archetypal journey, examining human and cultural relationships to sound and space, that is both inward and outward.

Through a sequence of corridors, chambers, gateways, and challenges within this memory palace, the psychological and sociological fabric in which we coexist, illuminate larger truths of the cyclical nature of life.