Replaying the Tape: Poetry, Percussion, and Paleontology
November 9 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Thursday – 11/9 – 7 PM
Adirondack Center for Writing
15 Broadway, Saranac Lake, NY 12983
‘Replaying the Tape’ is an interdisciplinary collaboration between three women practitioners: New-York based composer Dr. Jane Boxall, paleontologist Dr. Frankie Dunn, and poet Penny Boxall. In a one night live performance the trio will conjure an imaginary menagerie of animals which might have existed had the dice-throw of evolution fallen differently. Jane will provide live percussion alongside Penny’s live poetry performance. The performance will include field recordings from Dr. Dunn’s archaeological digs, tape manipulation of found sounds, and excerpts from research. The audience will be compelled to consider the role that chance plays in our own existence.
Jane Boxall
Jane Boxall is an adventurous composer-percussionist, working across diverse musical genres. As a soloist, collaborator and session player, Jane has performed in concert halls, art galleries, cafes, castles, kindergartens, hospitals, universities, forests and festivals from Cyprus to San Francisco, India to Quebec, and Manhattan to France. She is dedicated to new music, specializing in contemporary art music on marimba and vibes, and rock and hiphop drumkit for original artists. Born in England and raised in Scotland, Jane completed her BA and MA in Contemporary Music at the University of York (UK), and her Doctorate in Percussion Performance & Literature (minor in Composition & Theory) at the University of Illinois.
Frankie Dunn
Frankie Dunn is a palaeobiologist based at the University of Oxford. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Warwick in 2015 and her PhD in 2019 from the University of Bristol. She subsequently moved to Oxford to take up two fellowships: a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College and an Early Career Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the exhibition of 1851. She is now a NERC Independent Research Fellow and a Senior Researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Frankie’s research focuses on the rise of animals: a profound transition in the History of Life – for the first-time organisms were able to engineer the environment around them, altering geochemical cycles, building complex ecosystems and diversifying into myriad forms. The ultimate aim of this research is to understand how animal bodyplans evolved in deep time.
Penny Boxall
Penny Boxall is a poet whose published collections are: Ship of the Line (Eyewear, 2014); Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018); and In Praise of Hands (with Naoko Matsubara’s woodcuts, Ashmolean Museum, 2020). She has won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (Scotland’s largest poetry prize) and the Mslexia/PBS International Women’s Poetry Prize. She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships/residencies with UNESCO Cities of Literature, Tartu, Estonia (2022); Merton College, University of Oxford (2019); Château de Lavigny, Switzerland (2018); Hawthornden Castle, Scotland (2017, 2023); and Gladstone’s Library, Wales (2017). Her poetry has appeared in places including The Sunday Times, POETRY (Chicago) and The Rialto. In 2021 she received funding from Arts Council England to develop her first novel for children. In 2023 Merton College Choir will premiere a work by Gabriel Jackson, setting new poems by Penny.