Biography
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, filmmaker, writer, singer/songwriter, researcher and educator from Houston Texas. Li is trained as a classical voice/opera singer and performs across a wide range of genres and mediums. She is a certified facilitator of DEEP LISTENING®, the sonic philosophies of composer Pauline Oliveros. Li's work focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She uses voice, theremin, movement, improvisation, meditation and new media to explore healing in performance and living. She recently premiered The Last Resort, the final act of her live cinema trilogy Cry of the Third Eye: a new opera film in Three Acts, a decade long meditation on legacy, loss, and gentrification in Third Ward Houston, Texas. EarthSeed, her co-composition with composer Nicole M. Mitchell which celebrates the novels by Octavia E. Butler, is being released June 2020 on FPE Records.
Research
Onshore Trilling: What to do When the Earth Sings the Bruise is a research project by Lisa E. Harris that will develop into a performance cycle composition inspired by the life cycle of an oil and gas field. Investigating the relationship between voice, Earth, body, vibration, space and ritual, environmental and community healing initiatives are attempted through experimental public performances. Reimagining traditional folk songs via the blues, approaching seismic graphs as graphic scores, and processing seismic waves through a human voice database creates a song cycle to be performed onshore, near or in proximity to productive offshore drilling sites in Norway, Texas, the Gulf South of the USA, and beyond. This project challenges gender performativity of both the Earth and the role of the Explorer, while experimenting at the intersections of non traditional opera, environmental justice, and interdisciplinary performance art practice.
