Metamorphosis
Narrative Worldbuilding for Live Preformance
Metamorphosis is a live performance weaving story, sound, and projection to follow a butterfly’s life cycle—our metaphor for human growth, loss, and renewal. Together with screenwriter-performer Adeline Ferolo and projection designer August Graham, I shaped this work as a shared act of making. It lives only in the moment of performance, and then it’s gone.
What I do
Roles: storyteller, writer, narrator, soundscape designer, and storyworld builder.
Goal: anchor the show with sound that carries the narrative and deepens its emotional arc.
How I build the sound
Tools: field recordings, voice, foley, and REAPER for editing and manipulation.
Palette: a blend of natural and technological sounds to mirror modern life meeting older ways of knowing.
Arc:
A deep earth-rumble to suggest primordial forces.
Elemental passages—fire, thunder, wind, rain.
A soft, nurturing ambience of a caterpillar’s egg to signal beginnings.
Themes and influences
Transformation as a cyclical process: life, death, and rebirth.
Guided by cyclical concepts of time found in many traditions, including the Lakota sacred hoop (Deloria, 2003) and Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime (Rose, 2000).
Challenges the linear idea of “start” and “end,” offering continuity and return instead.
What audiences experience
An immersive, sensory journey where sound leads the way.
Space to reflect on personal cycles of change, grief, and renewal.
A felt sense that endings are also openings.
In short: the soundscape is the backbone of Metamorphosis—shaping a live, unrepeatable experience that uses the evolving sonic imagination to connect ancient cycles with contemporary life.