Elizabeth Clark is a Hudson Valley-based composer, performance artist, multi-instrumentalist (harp, piano, voice), experimental theater-maker, healing artist, and humanitarian. She composed and developed "Seeds Under Nuclear Winter: An Earth Opera" as an artist-in-residence at Byrdcliffe Artists Colony. Her large-scale interdisciplinary opera is a recreation of lucid dreams and spiritual visions through music, movement, storytelling, and light experiments, and has been performed annually by a cast of more than 35 Hudson Valley performance artists, musicians, and dancers.
Elizabeth’s work combines interdisciplinary art forms with contemplative practices, weaving together elements of ethereal future-folk music, sacred and world music, experimental theater, movement/dance, ecstatic poetry, mythology, and the healing arts. Her work is focused on creating meaningful and deeply transformational community experiences through live performance art.
A composer with the Hudson Valley nonprofit Sagearts, her musical healing work with elderly Holocaust survivors is featured in the documentary PBS special, We Remember: Songs of Survivors. She records original music and performs with her ensemble, Mamalama, throughout the Northeast. A longtime student of spiritual elder Grandfather Albert (Mi’qmac/New Brunswick), she also leads traditional healing ceremonies.
About my work:
I approach music not only as a performance, but also as a form of prayer and a bridge between world cultures— exploring spiritual experience, global mythologies and sacred traditions, and the interconnectedness of human relationships with our planet and each other. I view my work as a healing art, creating ways to step into sacred space together through the doorway of music.
An artist-in-residence at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Colony of the Arts from 2018-2021, I finished composing “Seeds Under Nuclear Winter: An Earth Opera”, a large-scale interdisciplinary body of work for live world and sacred music, dance, storytelling, moving visual art, and light experiments. The ‘Earth Opera’ is a transformation of visions, dreams, and spiritual experiences into an immersive experience— stepping into otherworldly realms and unfolding upon a non-linear and timeless path, similar to the way we dream. This project was designed to initially be performed site-specifically INSIDE of the earth, in a vast amphitheater-like cement mine in Rosendale NY (Widow Jane Mine). After 4 years of annual performances and evolutions of the ‘Earth Opera’ in the mine, we also adapted the immersive experience for performance in sanctuary spaces, including the ‘Cathedral of Kingston’ (Old Dutch Church), integrating the giant wall of pipe organ (over 2,000 pipes) as a source of ‘drone’ for the show.
The trajectory of my musical work has been shaped by many deeply formative experiences; finding a deep connection between the creation of music, healing, and the embodied practice of prayer; being present with those who are dying through live music at the bedside; and, working with the life experiences of Elders through the transformational and healing power of music, storytelling, and song.
Music is and has always been, for me, a form of medicine. It has become a way of prayer. It is a mirror. It can hold anything for us. Music reaches the heart quickly. It heals, it teaches, moves us, soothes us, riles us, strengthens us, and gives us good company if we are lonely. It soothes a cranky child. We can pray with it, we can cry into it, we put into musical forms our joy, sorrow, wonder, anger, hope. It is (mostly) invisible in it's delivery, ancient and reinvented rhythms and new melodies traveling wherever they want, without boundaries— free, like water, lifting up and crossing over and under all borders, and redistributing as it pleases. It carries the stories and rhythms of our ancestors, and it always has. It breaks our heart. It heals our broken heart.
There is nothing that music cannot hold.
I have been a composer/songwriter with the Hudson Valley non-profit organization ‘Sagearts’ since it began in 2014, deeply committed to working with music as a way to honor and celebrate the lives of Elders in my community. ‘Sagearts’ music projects involve collaboration between Elders and songwriters to create original songs honoring and deeply reflecting upon an Elder’s individual life, bringing forward the jewels of each persons long life experience, and sharing them with the larger community through live performance. Most recently, I was creating original songs with Elders who are survivors of the Holocaust—a deeply moving musical project that has now been made into a documentary film called "We Remember: Songs of Survivors", airing nationally on PBS in April2022. (https://www.weremembersongsofsurvivors.com)
I have been present with live harp and vocal music at the bedside for those receiving hospice/end of life care within nursing homes, hospitals, and private homes.—- offering live music in prayerful support of the one who is dying, and for the family surrounding them during their transition. This work found me long ago while working in a nursing home during my college years…
A 94 year old grandmother with no living family was actively dying—completely alone— with nothing but the television set blaring in her room. Traveling down the hallway with my harp for an ‘activities’ program for the elders that day, one of the nurses asked if I could sit with the woman for a few minutes, as they were very short staffed and they didn’t want her to be alone. I entered the room with my harp and sat at the bedside. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I started playing and singing softly, without knowing what I was doing or playing, letting the music become a wordless prayer. I witnessed fear in her eyes—-but in this moment —now together—holding our gaze and carried by music— the fear seemed to lift. She finally left her body. We were held together during this sacred moment by the beauty and mystery of music.
That moment changed my relationship with Music.