‘The Crossroads Project’ is TED-style performance that explores issue and urgency of sustainability

Live performance highlights one of the great conversations of our time in the latest event in the 2017-18 Fine Arts Series.

“The Crossroads Project: Rising Tide” is a TED-style performance that blends poetic science, powerful music and evocative imagery. It will explore the issue and urgency of sustainability at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 10, at the Stephen B. Humphrey Theater, Saint John’s University.

Grounded in science and elevated by art, the project offers audiences an evocative and shared space from which to contemplate the choices before us. The performance features original music by composer Laura Kaminsky.

The Crossroads Project is an ongoing experiment – a partnership between the two great endeavors of science and art. It seeks to take an audience from intellectual understanding to visceral experience to personal resolve.

The music of Crossroads is at the core of the performance, and performed by the Fry Street Quartet. The quartet, Utah State University’s string quartet in residence, opens with the first movement of Haydn’s “Sunrise.” Kaminsky’s “Rising Tide” anchors the performance, and the final movement is from Janacek’s first quartet.

Physicist and educator Robert Davies explores the impact of Earth’s rapidly changing climate and humanity’s opportunity for a new direction, with images from painter Rebecca Allan, photographer Garth Lenz, sculptor Lyman Whitaker and movement artist Camille Litalien displayed behind the group.

The SJU Art Gallery will host the paintings of Allan which are featured in this performance, and the audience is invited to a reception in the Gallery following the show.

Tickets for the performance are $26 for adults, $23 for seniors, $19 for CSB/SJU faculty and staff, $15 for students and youth and $10 for CSB and SJU students.

For tickets, call the Benedicta Arts Center Box Office at 320-363-5777 or order online.

The event is sponsored in part by Wilkie Sanderson.

These activities are made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.