NATURE FETISH  is a hybrid rat-being thriving across field and street and woods and desert, now unaware that it is being watched, now meeting your eyes with a piercing gaze, now munching on the scraps that have fallen down onto the tracks, now squeaking in extended techniques at the top of its creosote-caked lungs.

PPL set out as social scientists and have returned home de-anthropomorphized, clinging to five distinct aural performance theories: each episode in this 5-part opera performs a theoretical cluster of senses and nonsenses regarding the “nature of nature.” These theoretical frameworks were built from human “fetishes,” or projected desires for the existence/agency/forms/forces of “nature,” and were sought/defined/constructed through five public workshops at University Settlement. A brief documentary video of this process can be seen at: http://vimeo.com/33440068. We then translated each stream of theory into process-based, often participatory, sometimes theatricalized frameworks and sequences of notated and aleatoric music, text, actions, and images, stretching ourselves taut across discipline and daily existence, sniffing transhuman butts, we are anhingas simmering in salty grease, we are attempting to possess/objectify and be possessed by/be objectified by the “nature of nature,” as it all rots and streams in gluey rivulets through our fingers. Grand piano, saxophone, guitar, violin, turntables, electronics, clarinet, percussion, voices, flute, feet, fuschia fog, iceberg lettuce.