Fever Pitch
The Linda, WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio
Albany, N.Y.
Jan. 27, 2024
The most striking feature of Taína Asili’s evolving multimedia concert/performance piece Fever Pitch, for me, was the tone.
Most art about climate change is heavy with despair. Fever Pitch leans into optimistic melodies with an energetic beat.
“While my lyrics may be holding the weight of stories related to our climate crisis,” Asili wrote via email after the show, “the drums, guitar, and bass can ground us and/or help us to reconnect with our courage and resilience.”
To call Fever Pitch a show feels a little wrong. Yes, Asili sang and danced alongside backers Hettie Barnhill and Eliana Rowe, but the word show implies a kind of audience passivity that Fever Pitch seems designed to discourage. “The goal of this show for me is to use the power of art to help us transform our anxiety, grief, and despair into possibility and imagination and to move us toward action,” Asili said.
Asili opened the performance with a land acknowledgement. She told the audience where Fever Pitch came from: her son approached her with his worries about climate change. She told him there is hope, and that there are things he can do, and she believes in the transformative power of art.
For the bulk of the evening, Fever Pitch waltzed between three modes. First, an introduction discussing a song’s inspiration, political meaning, and purpose. Then, a glimpse of a mini- documentary about the issue. And then, as documentary footage played, Asili and her band would burst into song.
They began with “Plant the Seed,” a track about reconnecting to the earth through ancestral wisdom.
The songs that evening focused on the intersection between climate justice and other social issues. There was “Nature,” which comments on colonization and capitalism. “Resiliencia,” which had a harder edge, expressed fury at Hurricane Maria’s destruction with rock guitar riffs, and was backed by footage of the wreckage left by the storm. Asili sang the titular lyric two ways, she said: one way to express rage, the other to express hope. For “Horizon,” Asili asked the audience to write statements and slip them into a gourd, which she drew from like a raffle and incorporated into the song: “Renewal. Resilience. Indigenous. No more fossil fuels.”
She ended with “Fever Pitch,” which alternated downbeat verses about the horrors of global warming with an upbeat chorus about catching a “fever” for liberation. This last song brought a prolonged standing ovation from the audience.
This was not just entertainment. Asili, who had spent much of the performance nudging the audience toward participation, returned from a short intermission to host a panel discussion on climate justice. She brought out a handful of local activists: Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, Xanthe Plymale of Fridays for the Future, Alÿcia Bacon of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and Mertin Simpson of the Sheridan Hollow Alliance for Renewable Energy. The panelists spoke about solutions to the climate crisis and the necessity of climate activism. “Act with the urgency required,” Simpson said, “because we are at a tipping point.”
The show wrapped promptly. Before descending from the stage, Asili urged the people in the audience to talk to each other and find community. And they did, lingering at the Linda, talking, sharing, connecting, well after she was gone.
