The theater at the Glorya Kaufman Community Center was sold out for the Thursday August 27, 2026, performance of Currents, with concert-goers filling the seats up to the top row. With the number of composers involved in the program and all the musicians onstage, the vibrations of excitement and anticipation were all but audible before the performance even began.
Created, curated and led by Kinsella, Currents is a presentation of work by multiple composers, also featuring dancers, framed as sequences entitled Source, Confluence and Release. Kinsella offered that “Currents explores the forces that move with and between us…original music and movement trace how memory, culture and creative impulse begin within the individual, meet other voices and become something shared.”
Moderator Rene Hack introduced each piece, and brought the composers up to the stage to offer thoughts on how each section had come to be written; the wide variety of styles all blended beautifully into sonic storytelling. Kinsella’s works, which closed each segment of the performance, included ‘reimagined’ variations on her previous compositions Contingency, Congruence, and Back on This Planet.
Like a musical version of the old fairy tale ‘Stone Soup,’ it was almost surprising – and not surprising at all – how these eclectic elements came together into a complete whole that sounded both inevitable and entirely organic.
This year’s final performance of Currents will be on September 3 at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum at 7:30 pm.
Tickets: $35 (DISCOUNT CODE: 5CURRENTS)
For more information, visit:
emersionmusic.com
Judith Martin-Straw
