SARAH BERNSTEIN

This collaborative performance between Eunoia Jean Close, Gabriel Antonio Reed, and myself developed from my ongoing interest in the politics, culture, literature, and phenomena that emerged from the Rocky Mountain locust plagues of the 1870’s.  

 

The performance reimagines elements of this time period through a lens of the erotic pastoral, anachronism, folktale, and glitch. The work consists of original electronic compositions, sourced locust field recordings, monologue and harmonium, an instrument which peaked in American popularity during the locust plagues of the 1800s. 

 

The projected video simultaneously accompanying the performance is a simulation of the night sky as seen from Plattsmouth, Nebraska in June 1875.  This is the town where Albert Childs, a local judge and occasional meteorologist, stared at the sky for days in an attempt to calculate the size of the locust swarm passing overhead. His data  estimated the swarm to cover close to 198,000 square miles. Later this understood to mean the swarm consisted of approximately 12.5 trillion insects. This account is still listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest concentration of insects recorded.