Heap Cull Gather Sow

A Vocal Performance by Sarah M. Greer 

Minneapolis College music faculty member Sarah M. Greer will perform Heap Cull Gather Sow, at Pillsbury House + Theatre’s Naked Stages 2024 Performances Nov. 21 and 23 at 7 p.m. 

Directed by Dipankar Mukherjee, with words and music by Greer, Heap Cull Gather Sow is a ceremonial journey through grieving, ancestral guidance, and heart memory carried by tears and talismans, movement and memory, stories and songs. 

Sourced from intuition and melody, Heap Cull Gather Sow asks how we hold loss and sorrow from the present and the past and from where we garner the resources to re-imagine and re-member ourselves. 

The performances are part of a 2024 fellowship that Sarah M. Greer and three other performers received for early career performance artists in Minnesota, provided by Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T), with support from the Jerome Foundation. The program is designed to give artists a supportive environment for building their performance and production skills while creating a stage or site-specific performance piece with PH+T as the venue. Naked Stages emphasizes the development of artistic process more than technical production.

Following Greer’s performance, fellow hal sansone will perform Trans Man Gay Club Disco Fantasy. The performance features a gay trans man looks for belonging in queer nightlife. Artist fellows Atim Opoka and Skye Reddy will perform their works on Nov. 22 at 7 p.m.

Greer is an educator and a singing, improvising, and performing artist who works at the intersection of song, sound, and story. Greer has performed in numerous Twin Cities venues, at the Twin Cities and Madison, WI Jazz Festivals, for NPR’s Talking Volumes with Give Get Sistet, opened for Take 6 (also with Give Get Sistet), and has invented music on regional and national stages. 

As a faculty member at Minneapolis College, Greer recognizes how careers in vocal performance can feel abstract. “It’s part of my job as an instructor to be a working artist so students can see what an artistic career may look like,” said Greer, who emphasizes and demonstrates to students and the community that there are myriad ways to make a living as a vocal artist.

“This fellowship provided me with an opportunity to step outside of what I know and what is comfortable to me,” said Greer who recognizes this is something instructors request of their students every day. “It’s important to challenge ourselves as faculty to model what we are asking from our students.”

Naked Stages also afforded Greer an opportunity to explore her generative process, first by creating visual art in the form of collages to bring forth curiosity and to see and study her performance art in physical, concrete, and emotional ways. Throughout their process, Greer recognized how improvisation is a significant piece of their music and artistry and moving it into intuition can add depth to their work. 

“Intuition comes from the information we gather throughout our lives and experiences,” said Greer who brought her previous grief-related work into this work as a fellow. “The show came from me noticing the ceremonial processes I was finding and using to express my own grief and, from there, expanded.” Greer recognized how midwestern culture says grief is private, however, when public wounds impact entire communities, grieving must also be public, and our collective voices can create individual and communal healing.

As a recording artist and composer, Greer released their original and highly improvised debut album What the Music Says Do in 2018 and will release a live album of their improvised vocal work Between: A Journey Through the Middle later this year. Additionally, Greer is developing an improvised composition sourced from the sounds we make as we express sorrow entitled Giving Voice to Grief.  Learn more about Greer at www.sarahmgreer.com.

Dipankar Mukherjee is a professional director originally from Calcutta, India with a 35-year history of directing in the UK, Canada, India, and the US. He is a co-founder and the Artistic Director of Pangea World Theater, and a 2023 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award recipient.

Find out more about the Pillsbury House + Theatre.