collaborations

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is an online storytelling game based on Franz Kafka’s book of the same name. In this collaboration between Molly (vocalist/watercolor painter/composer) and Cristina Lord (electronic musician/composer), the viewer will be prompted to select narrative options on a "choose-your-own-adventure" style website. Each option triggers a combination of vocal and electronic tracks with soloists performing the dialogue as well as animated watercolors depicting the scenes painted by Molly.

In the premiere of this project in C3LA’s Interspace concert, audience and singers navigated their way through Franz Kafka’s tale of alienation together using a live-streamed combination of Zoom and Jamulus.

View the performance below (it starts at 56 mins).

Score for the Near Future

score for the near future is a collaboration with sculptor Jimena Sarno that includes vocal performance and composition by Molly combined with custom made walnut furniture, hand thrown and hand inscribed porcelain wares, light fixtures and lightbulbs, horn speakers, amplifiers, custom randomizing sound program. The composition is played back in the space in intervals, re-articulating harmony and dissonance into new formations. The piece considers the friction of dissonance, re-interpretation and re-composition as generative of imagined possibilities and insists on the re-evaluation of the idea of a tangible future and on the local, domestic and intimate circles of influence and mutual care that each of us are capable of accessing within our reach to alter established structures.

HYSTERIA

HYSTERIA is an opera project by Molly and librettist Divya Maus that will explore the myth of Hysteria, the medical syndrome first attributed by the Greek physician Melampus to a group of women who “refused to honor the phallus.” From his initial seed arose the idea of interpreting real distress experienced by women as irrational madness. We will explore Hysteria in comedic, visceral, and explicit detail using five real, fictional, and mythological Heroines – Hera, the Greek goddess; The Poet, Sojourner Truth; The Mother, an Indian Hindu woman in her 30s charged with marrying off her son; The Bride, based on the narrator in Charlotte Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”; and The Protagonist, who reflects the lived experiences of Divya and Molly.

HYSTERIA was selected for Overtone Industries’ Original Vision development program and April 2021 showcase. “The Yellow Wallpaper” scene was presented as a film and can be seen in the video below, starring Laurel Irene, James Hayden, Ashley Faatoalia, Lindsay Abdou and Joanna Lynn Jacobs. The scene is directed by O-Lan Jones.

Musical Trades

"Musical Trades" is an project Molly started during the COVID-19 quarantine in which she asks musician friends (or new musician friends) to record something - anything - and send it to her to add something - anything - to it. And then she does the reverse. There are no parameters to the music - it can be any style, and can be as composed or spontaneous as the performers desire. At the end of the process, there are two new pieces of music to be shared and enjoyed. Below are some examples of these musical trades.