LOOK BACK, RUNNING
The perils of courtship, then and now.

The oldest love story in the West is a warning about looking back. Orpheus, granted his beloved Eurydice from the underworld, was given one rule: walk forward, don't turn around. Until the moment he turned, he could see her only as a reflection — a presence behind him, glimpsed in mirrors, never met face to face. When he finally turned to make her real, she vanished. And Orpheus, alone again, took up his lyre and sang the first lament — music made of loss, music that became the source of all music after.

Two thousand years later, we are still falling for reflections. Only now the mirror is a screen, and the figure behind us is a profile — curated, lit, swipeable, never quite a person. We chase the image. We refresh the image. We test the image against itself. And in the moment the image must become a human being — a meeting, a voice, a body in a room — we panic, we ghost, we swipe again. The verification ritual that promises connection delivers anxiety instead. We are a culture of Orpheuses, turning and turning, watching our Eurydices sink, and we have not yet learned to make the music that follows.

This fall, Choral Chameleon offers a remembering. Over his career, American composer Conrad Susa set the complete Chamber Music of James Joyce — thirty-six poems tracing a single love through twilight gardens, fevered nights, doubt, ache, and the long backward look at the end. Susa composed the cycle in three sets, the last of which he completed shortly before his death in 2013. Until now, only the first two have ever been performed or recorded. This concert presents the world premiere of the third and final set — and with it, the first complete performance of Susa's Joyce, anywhere, ever. For Artistic Director Vince Peterson, a leading scholar on Susa's choral work, the evening is the culmination of years of advocacy.

Around the Susa cycles, we weave a century of song — standards and pop, classical and contemporary choral — music that names what we are losing and music that knows the way back.

Joyce's lover does not chase a reflection. He follows a living woman into a real garden. He stays inside the love until the love is finished. That commitment is the balm.

The story is old. It still works.

Look back, running.

Look Back, Running - Performance 2

Choral Chameleon Chorus