Constance Cooper, known for her poetry reading and piano and electric keyboard tuned just a quarter-tone apart, will be appearing on September 14 at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Cooper will perform as a soloist as part of the 9/11 Cultural Festival, reading poems about violence and loss by the Polish, Nobel-prize-winning poet Wyslawa Szymborska. The specially tuned piano and keyboard are known for their uncanny ability to reproduce the elusive pitches found in the spoken human voice.
Cooper has had a busy year, creating and collaborating on several projects. In March she performed together with mime Andrea Clinton in a without-break, three-hour duet improvisation which was inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” Cooper and Clinton had previously collaborated on Poe’s “The Raven” at the New York Poe Visitor Center.
She also appeared as the keyboards improviser for George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” at the Medicine Show Theater in June and July. In the middle of July Cooper improvised one of her own compositions for the “Walt Whitman Opera” at the underground zero festival, also in New York.