Heart of Origin: six poems of Rita Dove
music by Luke Mayernik
World Premiere performance on Tuesday, May 9th @ 8pm (PT)
at The San Francisco Conservatory of music!
LIVE online streaming available!
DETAILS BELOW!
Rita Dove
photo credit: Fred Viebahn
'And now through the windshield
the sky begins to blush
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.' - Rita Dove
Excerpt from the poem Exit by Rita Dove
Copyright © 1995 Rita Dove. Mississippi Review. All rights reserved.
Luke teams up with Pulitzer Prize winning and US Poet Laureate Rita Dove to create a strikingly new and audacious song cycle entitled Heart of Origin: six poems of Rita dove.
Heart of Origin contains six (6) remarkable poems of Rita Dove, electrified with the resilience, strength, and complexity of the feminine heart. In his own words, Luke writes:
As a young boy, I was raised believing that all women are the ‘Heart of Origin, the source of every beginning, every human being.’
Strong, resilient, peerlessly complex, and a divine vessel for bringing life into our world, The Feminine is the universal symbol of
existence—the Heart of every origin. Regrettably, the contemporary political climate and the rhetoric surrounding women’s issues
at times is filled with prejudice, unjust discrimination, and dismissive condescension towards the feminine spirit. Equipped with
purpose by uniting words and music towards the creation and the successful performance of a new song cycle entitled
“Heart of Origin,” it is our intention to celebrate the heart of all women.