Join us with Prospect Park Alliance to welcome 2025!
Take a moment to prioritize slowing down, reflecting, and appreciating the beauty of nature, tea, art, and community as we step into the new year.
“ Listening is a voluntary process that through training and experience produces culture. All cultures develop through ways of listening. Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, or one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is.”
-Pauline Oliveros
What’s Planned for Our Winter Tea Experience
Sound Performances by Ma, Testu Collective, and Dan Gorelick
Maria Takeuchi and Alec Fellman of Ma will start with a longform music performance in collaboration with Serena Stucke and Dan Tesene of Testu Collective. They will create an intricate soundscape through amplified objects and synthesized sounds. Artist and cello player Dan Gorelick will perform a solo cello set, and join in the collective soundscape with MA and Testu Collective to close the performance.
Odes to Common Things Poetry Writing with Robin Lampman
Participating in our ongoing community art project, Odes to Common Things, through poetry writing to reflect on our shared experiences and this moment. To learn more about the project, check here.Ikebana Installation by Kristina Bajunaisgvili
Experience the beauty of nature through the flower arrangement created for this gathering.Fireside Conversations and Tea with our community members
Gather around the outdoor fire to enjoy tea, conversations, and the serenity of the winter park.
Practical Tips:
Plan ahead for a leisurely stroll to the Boathouse.
Bring your own cup.
Please bring a cushion if you prefer to sit on the floor comfortably, as chairs and cushions may not be guaranteed.
This is a free event with limited space. Registration is required.
About the artists:
MA is the collaborative sound works of ÉMU +insomniac hotel
ÉMU aka Maria Takeuchi creates sonic and visual poems, merging organismic soundscapes with generative art and illuminating objects inspired by nature. Maria plays and conducts the sound objects with a delicate yet intentional focus. The subtle sound textures created by sand, dry leaves, and shells on the handmade instruments, processed for added aesthetic atmosphere.
insomniac hotel is the music of surfaces, where synthetic and organic tones gather and build micro-worlds of sound. Crafted from modular synthesizers, field recordings, and various instruments and objects, these sonic landscapes become spaces unto themselves to think, feel, and listen.
Dan Gorelick is an artist who uses classical instruments and computation to create sonic experiences that connect people to themselves, each other, and the natural world. His sound practice is informed by his 25 years of cello experience, sharing his sound in many different contexts. His work explores how music, as a time-based medium, serves as a vehicle to appreciate timescales—human, biological, geological—and to promote awareness of our relationship with nature and climate. His practice draws inspiration from deep listening approaches, exploring the meditative, healing, and connective nature of sound.
Testu Collective is an NYC-based intermedia art group founded by Dan Tesene and Serena Stucke. Testu creates intermedia performances, experimental videos, concept soundtracks, audiovisual experiences, sound art, and performance art installations. Tesene and Stucke are interested in creating environments that challenge the traditional audience experience. Testu has produced site-specific installations and curated works for Triskelion Arts (Brooklyn), Wallplay On Canal (NYC), Flux Factory (Governors Island), Sound Pedro (Los Angeles), Chashama (Brooklyn), CTM Festival(online), Ars Electronica(NYC), Ace Hotel(NYC), The Shed(NYC), Pleamar Festival(Buenos Aires), Theaterlab(NYC), Public Visuals(Tokyo).
Kristina Bajunaishvili is a devoted practitioner of ikebana in the Sogetsu tradition. She approaches flowers as a sculptural medium, exploring and shaping spaces with both plant and non-plant materials. Especially drawn to foraged elements—local, invasive, as well as non-plant materials—Kristina loves to create immersive surrealist compositions and large-scale installations that exist independently or are reimagined through photographs, video, and collaborations with music and movement artists.