The Moth Project

David Attenborough meets Laurie Anderson in The Moth Project, a new production from Peter Kiesewalter, Grammy-nominated and Emmy-winning creator of the East Village Opera Company. Blending music, family history, and moth lore, The Moth Project brings art and science together in entirely original and unexpected ways.

Peter Kiesewalter (keyboard) and Whitney La Grange (violin) perform before a large screen displaying a stunning visual tour of moths and the fascinating world they inhabit. Using macro photography, slow motion video, and dynamic motion graphics, these images are projected onto the performers - enveloping them and the audience - into a strange and remarkable world.

From Bach to Joni Mitchell to KISS to original songs, the music reflects the incredible diversity of the moth species (160,000!) and explores themes common to both us and them - transformation, seduction, migration, life/death. Between songs, a narrative arc traces the parallel journeys of a moth's life cycle and one family's perilous migration (like so many million today) to North America. By exploring the ways in which we see moths, from guardians of dreamtime (Indigenous mythology) to harbingers of death (Western mythology), as well as from the science perspective of the moth as egg, caterpillar, cocoon, and finally fabulous winged being, the show finds kinship between them and the human spirit's resilience and capacity for change.

The show is poignan, funny at times, and thoroughly entertaining. Integrating live music, video, storytelling, and science, the 75 minute show aim to instill a sense of wonder, appreciate, connection, and curiosity about our natural world.