vu: hello, and welcome to a "kqed newsroom" special edition on the arts. i'm thuy vu. across the bay area, artists are tackling topics that are thought-provoking, moving, and surprising. on this show, we bring together highlights from our arts coverage. one group of singers explores the threshold between life and death. and we'll look at an artist's large-scale works painted on a canvas of snow. plus, visual artist jim campbell plays with thousands of blinking lights to create tapestries that dazzle the eye. but first, we start with the company odc dance and a piece that tackles science and the environment. the impact of climate change, from rising sea levels to rising temperatures, is often expressed through charts and data. it's an appeal made more to the intellect and less so to the heart, but one bay area choreographer wants artists to help audiences

to see and feel climate change from a new perspective. producer sheraz sadiq takes us backstage with odc dance and a piece called "dead reckoning." nelson: ready. 1, 2, 3. "dead reckoning" is a dance piece that i created in 2014, and it's fundamentally about human beings' relationship to the natural world. we're gonna do the first section right now. my name is kt nelson, and i'm co-artistic director of odc. we're a dance company in san francisco. okay, so can you -- thwup! get around him? thwup! yeearrrn! oh, rah, yes! yes. okay? with this thing called climate change, we have scientific evidence, we have statistical analysis. i think maybe the missing ingredient is our emotional world. dance, because it is human beings onstage in a world, can help us embody the meaning of climate change.

[ sinister music plays ] the term "dead reckoning" is navigational. it refers to when you don't have your regular points of reference -- the stars. where we are with climate change is that we are navigating blindly right now. i think we're in the middle of dead reckoning. in the dance, there is this lime-green snow, or confetti, that first starts coming from the dancers' hands. and it's lime green. nothing in nature is like that. so it is about how we have transformed our world into a place we do not know. sadan: my name is josie sadan. i'm one of the dancers here at odc. no dance or work of art, necessarily, is going to give you the facts about climate change. what it can do is give voice to how people feel about it.

how does it affect the way we relate to one another? does it create anxiety? does it create vulnerability? nelson: "dead reckoning" came out of a sabbatical i took in 2013 to death valley. one of the things that really hit me is this great magnitude of nature. it made me realize how powerful nature is. even though we're so teeny, as individuals, we're having a huge impact in changing this world. so this is on the valley floor. it's 200 feet below sea level. i asked joan jeanrenaud to compose the music. jeanrenaud: for me, images and the feeling of a work have a lot to do with how i end up composing the music. [ playing suspenseful music ] the music for "dead reckoning" evolved over a process of working with kt. i would watch the dancers rehearse different sections.

♪ and that had a lot to do with how i composed the music. in particular, there's a scene in the dance where there's two women who are running. and to me, it really expresses this sort of frantic need and desire to do something now with the environment. there's the sound of a tree falling. so let me play that for you. [ rattling ] [ suspenseful music plays ] [ crunching ] the sound of the tree falling is used almost as a piece of music. nelson: i found it a powerful metaphor for where we are. there's something about the tree separating from its roots, the inevitableness of the descent, the unpredictableness of when it will actually fall. that's how i feel we are in the world right now

with our environment. ♪ one of the things i try to get across in the piece is this lack of awareness. dennis dances solo around the space while everybody is looking into him. and, at some point, he takes steffi's head, and he turns it to the audience and says, "look, look." 'cause he wants us to understand the implications of our actions. the natural world, to me, is a friend, is a best friend. i think if a dear friend is sick, any one of us would turn around and care for them. yet, here is our planet. it's in trouble, and i don't think we realize we need to care for it. today, we are at yerba buena center for the arts in san francisco. i'm putting all the final elements together -- the costume, the lighting. dancer: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. yeah. yeah.

nelson: actually, i'm feeling a little nervous. you never know what's gonna happen because it's live. sadan: the biggest challenge of dancing "dead reckoning" is just going zero to 100 and being really physical right away. curtains come up, lights are up, and we're already going. nelson: one of the things i want to convey is the feeling of being lost in this world of climate change. [ music climbs ] the panic. the franticness, the futileness of it. ♪ at the very end of this piece, there's a soloist very downstage, caught up in her own little world, and there's a couple in the back, what i call the romantic couple.

they are just walking inside this snow-filled world, and, eventually, they step on this other person and smash her. so, at the end, i ask the question, is what we do to the environment also what we do to each other? i don't know if i can change somebody's behavior or actions in the world. the one thing i can do is try to step into people's heart and try to get them to say, "oh, wow. we gotta do something." that's what i hope. vu: imagine working days at a time to create a massive work of public art, only to have it disappear overnight. that's a risk oakland-based artist sonja hinrichsen has learned to embrace working with snow as her canvas. producer lori halloran and photographer blake mchugh strapped on their snowshoes to follow hinrichsen,

as she attempted her first snow drawing in the sierra. ♪ hinrichsen: i've always been a really big fan of nature. even as a child, when i was upset, while other children would lock themselves into their room, i took a blanket, put it in my bike basket, and i was gone. i'm sonja hinrichsen, and i'm a visual artist. snow drawings actually started out of play. i was at an artist's residency in colorado, and i had snowshoes because i wanted to hike in the mountains. i found those really big, pristine fields of snow, and i just had to do something with them. ♪ so i started walking these patterns,

and it became interesting to me when i took out my camera and realized that the shadow that gets cast into the imprint makes the pattern. if there is no sun, there's no pattern. in 2009, there was this pilot who just offered that he could take me up so i could take photographs. it was pretty amazing because i had no idea how it would look from the top. i was in that airplane. i was like "wow!" i can't believe this." i feel like spirals are sort of inherent in us and in nature. our galaxy is a spiral. our fingerprint is sort of a spiral. so i just feel like it's a form that we all understand. it's very meditative, walking these patterns,

basically having the landscape sort of evolve around me. and that triggered the idea that this would be something to share with other people. if i do this with community, we can create a much, much bigger piece. [ chatting ] within the past six or so winters, i've done pieces in really many different scales. ♪ it's really up to the participants to interpret my idea. in france, the piece kind of wrapped around a mountainside along a ski slope. lake catamount in colorado was probably one of the biggest. we tried to re-create the yampa river that once flowed

through that valley on top of a frozen reservoir that is now there where the river used to be. i ask people to imagine themselves as a drop of water and to think about how water moves, you know, how it meanders. it was amazing. it worked really well. it emphasizes the landscape and, hopefully, gets people's minds going about how beautiful this landscape is and how important it is that we preserve it that way. [ suspenseful music plays ] [ beep, shutter clicks ] this is my first project in the sierra nevada. the sierras just didn't have much snow the past few winters. it's really amazing that we can do this this year. at the sagehen field station, there are two big meadows,

and i'm hoping that we can cover both of them. [ laughter ] you basically only have to get that first little round straight, and then you just keep following. you guys can go along the forest line as tight as you can. all right, let's go. this piece really asks me, as the artist, to give up a lot of control, to just let go and see what happens. okerman: when you start out, you know, you're sort of timid and you're feeling it out, but as you get more bold and moving through, you start to develop your own style. rexer: there are so many people out there all doing it together, and you kind of have to work with each other and like, "hey, are you gonna use that space over there, or can i go that way?" litchfield: snow is near and dear to our hearts.

most of us ski on it, or snowshoe on it, just from point a to point b. this is definitely something new and different. okerman: when people think of public art, they often think of sculpture or murals. snow drawings are a wonderful way to have art that no one really has to worry about. it comes and it goes. hinrichsen: we humans have put so much stuff on this planet. as an artist, i feel like there's no need for me to create even more stuff. i really love the fact that this work is ephemeral. it just melts away and that's that, and then there is only the documentation left of it and, of course, the memory of it in those people who participated. ♪ vu: how simple can an image become and still be recognizable? that's what visual artist jim campbell explores in his work.

he uses thousands of led lights or even simple light bulbs. from close up, the lights seem to blink at random, but take a step back, and your eyes begin to connect the dots. producer monica lamb and photographer aaron drury take us into the workshop of jim campbell. campbell: so, these are pixels, waterproof pixels that we're testing. i'm jim campbell, and i work with light in the field of electronic art. i was an engineer in silicon valley for close to 25 years. we made convertors from low-resolution tv to high-definition tv. one of the things that i was interested in early on and continue to be is, if you take away all of the details of an image, is there anything useful from an experience of looking at something that's low resolution? is there some sort of essence that can be found

in taking an image and getting rid of most of the information and just leaving a little bit there? my day job was high-definition tv, and my artwork went the other way. is it possible that it has different optical characteristics? a lot of the stuff that i do does start out as an experiment. a perceptual experiment. these are home movies found on ebay from the 1950s. they could be my home movies. they could be pretty much anyone's home movies from the 1950s. there's no projection. each of these little black circuit boards is a pixel, and they're suspended such that they all merge together to create an image reflected off of the wall. there's this kind of optimal distance where all of the light, as it's coming out in a cone, mixes with the light next to it

to create this smooth, soft image. this starts out as about 2 million pixels, and there's only 500 left. i'm kind of limited in what kind of imagery i can use for these low-resolution works. it needs to be very simple and have a simple background. like jane's pool, for example. we shot that from above. the bottom of the pool being the background, very simple. i had the kids wear black for that so that they would silhouette. so, this is the software that i use to convert an image from high-res to low-res. it's software that i wrote so that i can adjust how many pixels i'm capturing, filter it any way that i want. that's my favorite mosaic. it's a chagall mosaic. it's incredible.

that's another old roman mosaic, and that's that same mosaic filter. isn't that kind of amazing? [ laughs ] so, that's what it looks like from far away. so, about two years ago, i went to rome with a friend, and kind of the goal of that trip was to look at the original pixels, 'cause if you look at mosaics, they have a lot in common with what we think about as a picture element, which is what pixel stands for. i learned a lot from photographing in detail ancient mosaics. they actually resolve quite astonishingly by looking at them from far away. they go from being a cartoon to actually being a person. you could say, "oh, i know that person" kind of thing. it's kind of shocking. the largest project that i've done to date is the san diego airport. it's a 750-foot long sculpture.

it's 37,000 individually suspended glass spheres. because it's above your head, i can't put kind of an image that you're used to looking at, you know, with a bottom and a top. because then sometimes when you're looking at it, it would be upside down. i ended up choosing swimmers, almost like a swimming lane in a pool, though i specifically worked with swimmers who were not professionals. i think a lot of my work incorporates some sort of struggle in terms of the way people are moving. i grew up in a lower middle class, distant suburb, almost the country, near chicago. i never met an artist. i never knew there was an art school at that point. i think what surprised me the most was that i was able to become a successful artist,

depending on your definition of successful. ♪ vu: and now to our final story tonight. there are times when arts can offer solace and relief. for more than a decade, the threshold choir has been using music to ease the journey through the final days of life. they write and perform their own music to people in hospice care. the choir was started by three california women and has grown to include international chapters. producer rachel berger brings us the melodies of the threshold choir. all: ♪ you are not alone ♪ i am here now sager: i'm 38. all: ♪ you are not alone sager: my full name is adrian "luca" brooks sager.

i have terminal brain cancer. all: ♪ i am here beside you cadbury: i want to do this work of singing at the bedside of people who are dying because i feel very strongly that death is a very real part of life. and we can't just ignore it. all: ♪ may peace be with you kirner: when i go to the bedside, it is an opportunity to be in a very sacred space with someone because you are there with a person in their most intimate time. all: ♪ may love be kirner: they're going through their own questions about, "why me? am i gonna see tomorrow?" they're reflecting in a way that is very pure. ♪ all: ♪ ooh, ooh, ooh

munger: i am kate munger. i am the founder of the threshold choir. in 1990, i was asked to fill in a volunteer slot for a friend who was dying of hiv/aids. it was very distressing to see him comatose and agitated. so i did what i did at the time when i was nervous or afraid, and i started singing. i watched him calm, settle, get positively serene, and i calmed, settled, and got positively serene. i felt that i had discovered something, or rediscovered something, an ancient practice that tribal humans do for one another when someone's struggling. sager: it's helped with relieving some of my pain, some of my physical pain in my head. i just smile a lot. all: ♪ my grateful heart

kirner: i came close to death. i had a brain tumor that was very large, and it was a pretty scary time. i came out of that surgery blind and unable to walk, and i had an opportunity to decide, "okay, what am i gonna do now? you know, if i get better, i'm gonna do something -- something important." i always loved to sing, and i heard there were these people that sang to people who were dying. and i thought that was the most incredible thing i'd ever heard. i got a little -- a little shiver up my spine, and i went, "oh, i've got to go do this." munger: when they hear that first sound, especially when they hear the harmonies... ♪ ...it's a visceral experience. it's full-body absorption of vibration. cadbury: would you like some more songs, or is that enough? you can see that they begin to breathe more easily,

and it's just a feeling that they are relaxed and comfortable. and when they are feeling that way, you feel better, and it's just a reciprocal energy that goes back and forth. sager: i believe that our purpose as human beings is to be givers. however, however we can, we go through the hardships of life. we go through the beauty of life. we take all the energy, and we find a way to give and help others, so i'm proud of them. munger: we sing mostly small songs that are written by the choir members. kirner: people who don't do it don't get it. they're like, "why are you doing that?"

and i think what they're terrified of is actually seeing somebody who's dying. [ all singing ] most of us think of death as an event, but when i have seen people and they're dying, it's a process. i've been able to at least watch the process in others and ask myself, "how will i do it?" which i never would have had that conversation, ever. i would have just sat in fear. all: ♪ rest easy munger: a song can be a bridge from the purely physical, temporal body experience that we have for many years to what lies beyond. all: ♪ let every trouble drift away cadbury: doing this work has made me feel more alive and more into being in the moment, and i hope that at some point in the future

when i am on the threshold, someone will come and sing to me these beautiful, peaceful songs. all: ♪ we are all just walking each other home ♪ sager: when they come to sing, it's an act of love and support, which is what i need most in my life right now. all: ♪ we are all ♪ just walking each other home vu: before we go, we asked some of our producers to share a few thoughts on the stories they've worked on. berger: i knew when i heard about threshold choir that i really wanted to do this story. it's got singing, which is great television,

but also, it deals with very fundamental human questions. it deals with the question of, how can we be of service to others? how can we reach people who may appear to be unreachable because of what they're going through? and how do we face our own mortality? lam: i really like puzzles and riddles and brain-teasers, and jim campbell's work up close looks like just a bunch of blinking lights. and when you step back from it, i can feel my brain actually stitching together all of those lights and turning it into an organized, moving image. sadiq: for me, the purpose of art is not only to move us emotionally, but also to challenge our habits of perception. that is, to make us see things from a fresh and different and new perspective. and i think kt nelson does that with "dead reckoning" by using the medium of dance to personify the human impact of climate change. vu: that does it for us. i'm thuy vu. thanks so much for watching. for all of kqed's arts coverage, please go to kqed.org/arts. ♪

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