Drawing from UK-based composer Lola Perrin’s Significantus, this piano concert prompts reflection on how people can care for each other in the climate crisis. The performance seeks to unite us in community in order to imagine and to create a better, more compassionate world. Focusing on deep empathy/receptivity and profound—even wild—social imagination, the program is a space to feel and share emotions concerning the climate emergency that are suppressed in daily life. The event begins as a solo performance by Margaret Zheng, then evolves into a conversation portion for mutual storytelling and radical learning. In the finale, audience members are invited to join in through collective performative improvisation with song, spoken word, body percussion, and dance, symbolically commencing the creation of a new world for healing, harmony, and rebirth.
Sponsored by the E. Clyde Lutton 1966 Memorial Fund and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College (Haverford, PA, United States).
BIO: Margaret Zheng is a first-year student at Haverford College (Haverford, PA, United States) studying music and mathematics. They have studied piano since they were six years old, previously under the tuition of Randall Hartman and now with Katarzyna Salwinski. They earned a DipABRSM in Piano Performance in 2018. Besides solo performance, Margaret has also accompanied choirs, played keyboard synthesizer in pit orchestras for musical theater, and played in various other small and large ensembles, both as a pianist and a violist. They are also a budding composer and are passionate about music as a force for social justice and spiritual awakening. At their college, Margaret founded a hub of Sunrise Movement and has been active as an advocate for institutional practices and governmental policies that combat the climate crisis and the issues of social and economic oppression underlying it. They are "philosopher, artist, awakener," synthesizing reason, emotion, and action into a humanizing whole.
