Digital program booklet “Become Ocean”

A Sensory Immersion

“Listening to it, we become ocean.”

This quote comes from the mesostic poem Many Happy Returns by the composer John Cage, written in the late 1970s. Cage dedicated it to his friend and colleague Lou Harrison and wrote about his music: “Listening to it, we ourselves would become an ocean.” This idea fascinated John Luther Adams, Harrison’s student, so deeply that he chose it as the title for one of his most significant orchestral works: Become Ocean, completed in 2013. The composition was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ludovic Morlot and is inspired by the vastness and dynamics of the sea. Its wave-like, flowing structures reflect both the gentle calm and the unstoppable force of nature.

John Luther Adams was born in Mississippi in 1953. Nature shaped him from an early age, and his move to Alaska in the 1970s strengthened this connection. The landscape of the Pacific Northwest—its light, vastness, and climate—is reflected in Adams’s musical language. This language is characterized by a combination of minimal music, subtle textures, slow-moving harmonies, and spatial sound design. Adams draws his strongest influences from the American postwar avant-garde, including composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. Like them, he is particularly interested in fluidity—the merging of sound, space, and environment. Become Ocean creates an immersive experience that allows the audience to sink into the vastness of the sea. For this composition, Adams received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music as well as a Grammy Award in the composition category.
But Adams’s music is more than an aesthetic experience. It addresses the deeper connection between humanity and nature. In the notes to the score of Become Ocean, Adams writes: “Life on this earth emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea levels rise, we humans face the prospect that we may literally become ocean again.” The epoch-making piece of music can therefore be read as a meditation on the climate crisis—on depth, turbulence, stillness, and ultimate calm.

From this atmospherically dense soundscape, the choreographic duo LEE\VAKULYA develop a new creation of the same name for the Hessisches Staatsballett. The two choreographers are drawn to the graceful balance of nature, which gives life and, with its immense power, can also take it away again. Their choreography translates Adams’s musical structure into a comprehensive composition of body, technology, and space.

A prologue by sound designer Fanny Thollot first prepares the audience sensually for the upcoming sonic journey. Then the music unfolds: wave-like movements, dramatic climaxes, quiet passages—and LEE\VAKULYA transfer all of this onto the bodies of the twelve dancers. The choreography follows the principle of recurrence: movements emerge, dissolve, and reappear in altered form. Gentle, flowing sequences contrast with powerful, tension-filled moments. Solos merge with group formations, so that the dancers shift between individuality and collectivity—a reflection of the dynamics of proximity, dependency, and change. The bodies appear like living components of the stage space, which itself is set in motion. In this way, an overall composition emerges in which dance, music, and space merge into one.

The stage design by Yoko Seyama is flexible and dynamic: instead of fixed scenery, the Japanese artist creates a large, mobile installation made of lightweight materials that generates moments of interaction with the dancers. It rises slowly, evoking currents, waves, and the ocean’s continual motion. The lighting design by Taiwanese artist Joanne Shyue reinforces this effect: moving reflections of light recall sunlight beneath the water. The stage appears fluid and open; the boundaries between space, dancers, and audience dissolve. The orchestral musicians are placed visibly onstage, so that acoustic and physical layers merge into a unity through the live performance.

The costumes by Berlin-based Taiwanese designer Damur Huang convey the qualities of water in form, structure, and material. Each costume is unique, reflecting the individual characteristics of the dancers, supporting the circular and flowing movements, and intensifying the physical experience of the choreography.
In Become Ocean, LEE\VAKULYA show that dance does not merely illustrate music, but creates an independent dimension of rhythm, space, and volume. The stage becomes an organic, breathing body in constant motion. Bodies, light, stage, and sound merge into a whole—a poetic allegory of nature, its beauty, its violence, and the unstoppable circularity of life. Like the ocean itself, the work takes the audience on a journey between harmony and dissonance, between inner stillness and powerful dynamics—a sensory immersion in sound, movement, and space.

by Lucas Herrmann