What does it mean to survive in a world where extreme weather is becoming increasingly familiar—and devastating?
This multimedia installation brings together The Crossing, the four-time Grammy Award-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, with acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and writer Suzanne Bocanegra.
Conceived, written and designed by Bocanegra, How to Survive transforms The Crossing’s singers into a life-size, visual and sonic experience. Four new musical works—composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, Julia Wolfe and Ayanna Woods—form the backbone of the installation, with each movement responding to a different natural disaster: tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires. The work combines choral music, film, sound installation, lecture and gallery art to consider the increasingly urgent realities of climate change, environmental disruption and weather-related displacement.
Rather than treating climate disaster as an abstract or distant threat, How to Survive asks us to imagine ourselves inside it. Practical survival instructions appear alongside music and moving images, creating an experience that is at once unsettling, darkly humorous, intimate, and deeply human. The installation considers not only how people physically survive disasters, but also how technology, community, memory, art and collective knowledge might help us navigate a rapidly changing world. The collaboration creates an immersive, instructional and at times droll—and terrifying—exploration of what it means to endure, with The Crossing providing the vocal force at its center.
