Meet the Composer

The Great Immensity will be a theatrical performance with music created by composer Michael Friedman and writer/director Steven Cosson. The show looks at our abilities to perceive complex environmental systems and the radical climatic changes taking place in our era. Specifically, the piece investigates the gap between our cultural ability to imagine the “long time” of the natural world and our technological ability to disrupt these systems. The text, music and imagery—including projections by filmmaker David Ford—will be based on material gathered during trips to Barro Colorado Island, a reserve in the Panama Canal used by scientists to study the accelerating deforestation of tropical zones, and Churchill, Manitoba (Canada), a small town in arctic Canada whose economy is based in large part on tourism connected to polar bear migration—currently under threat due to climatic change.