C3LA: The Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles
C3LA is a unique ensemble dedicated to performing outstanding new choral music; providing a venue for multi-talented singer-composers and singer-conductors to collaborate; and challenging the traditional hierarchical model of our choruses and orchestras.
C3LA has no artistic or executive director—rather, it is collectively run by its members. The ensemble exclusively performs works composed in the last 25 years and 40-50% of each program is written in-house.
For information about upcoming concerts, visit c3la.org!
Composer-in-Residence with Iris Company
Drew has been brought on as the composer-in-residence for Iris Company’s new show, set to open in Summer 2022. The show will be a two-hour immersive dance and theater performance at the legendary John Sowden House.
Iris Company, under the direction of Sophia Stoller, is a group of artists based in Los Angeles dedicated to creating socially relevant, thought-provoking and moving experiences through dance, immersive performance, and film. The company aims to ignite a questioning of ineffective social norms and empower audiences through artistic experiences, twisting together psychologically driven ideas with a sensory stimulating fusion of contemporary dance, theater, film and video design, and music.
Performance Art Series : Funerals
Funerals is a series of performance pieces Drew began in 2016. The funerals are performative rituals of burying trauma, relationships or anything that needs to be let go of. Funerals can also be used for positive experiences that are coming to an end. All of the funerals involve some element of music; mostly voices, wine glasses, and winds, but can be voiced for any instrumental combination. In the funerals, the performer buries what they need to bury, and the audience is invited to place their intention on the performative ritual that will be buried along with the performer’s. The aim is to create a cathartic experience for both performer and audience.
Previous funerals have included:
- The Glass Funeral – using wine glass meditation and placing glass shards on significant points of a representative body
- The Funeral of the Absurd – a funeral for an absurd object as a surrogate, using absurdity to distance the performer from the actual event or trauma
- The Naked Funeral – involves the process of unclothing a body to nudity, then wrapping it slowly in an extremely long piece of cloth
- The Cardinal Funeral – separates the performance space into the cardinal directions, each assigned an emotional state (fear, anger, sadness, joy), which the performer moves through as they perform a piece of aleatoric music
