Friday June 13, 2025
7:30 PM
The Savoy Denver

The Playground Ensemble’s annual Pride show returns to close out the season in celebration of our artists and our community. Featured in this year’s program are Playground composers Silen Wellington and Nathan Hall, along with other Colorado creatives and beloved Playground collaborators.

In a political climate where our mere existence is at stake, we offer up new, visibly queer music, texts, and movement works, supporting voices of all ages from our Rocky Mountain Region. We reaffirm our deep passion for and commitment to those around us, making sure we keep close our families, friends, lovers, youth, and elders. These pieces for Pride 2025 ask us to love harder.

Doors at 7:00 PM, show at 7:30 PM.
FREE parking provided at Montessori Academy of Colorado on the corner of 26th and Curtis.

Program

Dronechoir (2025) by Arone Dyer

Performed by Playground Community Members

Dronechoir is a community singing event as well as a social performance experiment. Each singer is given musical and movement cues through earphones. In this special Playground-commissioned PRIDE version of the piece, Dronechoir reshapes itself through space-specific movement directions that are fed to generous, adventurous vocalists of diverse backgrounds whose voices vary in volume, range and timbre — which is where the movement directions come into play, physically foregrounding specific singers at different points in the piece. As a result, the singers may move closer to members of the audience than expected, bringing depth to the listener’s experience by challenging comfort barriers and introducing a heightened sense of engagement with the performance.

But discomfort is also a factor for the performers: Dronechoir combines unfamiliar collaborators with an unrehearsed performance, and everyone is singing together for the first time with people they may never have met before. We're given the opportunity to become comfortable with our discomfort, settling into the unknown. Throughout the piece, the vocalists learn what their role is within the choir and composition. By committing to this unrehearsed performance they naturally demonstrate a sense of hope and support, acceptance with what is in the moment, love and respect to our audiences and each other.

After Scandal, School Hires Witch (2023) by Silen Wellington

Performed by:
Silen Wellington, Narration & Electronics
David Short, Cello
Emily Lewis, Violin
Video Projection by Silen Wellington & Rorey King

*Content notes: transphobia, transphobic/queer slurs, suicide statistics, reference to gun violence

“After Scandal, School Hires Witch moves from national to local, using news clips highlighting the trends towards anti-LGBTQIA+ hatred. In it, you will hear clips from CBC, CBS, Fox News, CPAC speakers, Poudre School District board meetings, Erin Lee’s Twitter feed, conservative podcasts and lists of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation.

Locally, this piece responds to the hate spread by a group called “Parents Defending Education” (now rebranded as “Protect Kids CO”)  and specifically uses clips of Erin Lee, a parent who began antagonizing the school district, local LGBTQIA+ youth organization SPLASH, and me after she learned her kid had been attending a GSA club without telling her about it. In it, you will hear Erin discuss how the school district has a radical “gender and sexuality ideology that hurts kids,” because they host clubs such as Gender & Sexuality Alliance (formerly referred to as Gay-Straight Alliances) where students can talk to others about their identities. I became the subject of this hatred because of my former work at the Alliance for Suicide Prevention, where I visited classrooms to teach students and staff about LGBTQIA+ suicide prevention and mental health.

During the second half, I read a poem describing my perspective of the story.”

Program notes by the composer, Silen Wellington

Til the End of Time (2025) by Nathan Hall

Performed by:
Shane Courville, Trumpet
Nathan Hall, Electronics

Til the End of Time is a piece commissioned by Shane Courville, a New Music trumpet player, and composed by Nathan Hall. This piece reflects Shane's experience of love in the world - a queer love grown in South Louisiana, complicated by his own family's radical acceptance of him, and pitted against a homophobic Southern American culture. Til the End of Time brings together solo trumpet and electronics - sometimes dreamlike, evoking contemplative spaces, and sometimes a joyful electronic dance. Essences of Bjork and Radiohead abound with Nathan authentically capturing Shane's experience of the world of his past and his present.

Old Time Guitar by Morgan Harris

Performed by Morgan Harris, Guitar

Lonesome Road

“There are a multitude of different variants of this song scattered throughout the recorded history of American folk music - this one takes inspiration from a 1960s field recording by the banjoist and singer Addie Leffew. Her contemplative version helped me hear the song with new ears, and became the jumping off point for my rendition. I have the guitar tuned to emulate so-called ‘sawmill’ tuning on the banjo (in which the open strings form a suspended chord), which helps give this version its enigmatic, ‘neither major nor minor’ sound.”

Girl with the Blue Dress On

“A mysterious one from a 1967 recording of the Clay County, West Virginia fiddler Doc White, who also called it ‘Old Wylie’. This tune is extremely ‘crooked’ in its form (i.e. doesn’t conform to a consistent time signature) in a way that is distinctive of many fiddle pieces from this region. I thought the stately, spacious feel of the tune would especially suit a two finger banjo-inspired fingerstyle approach.”

Old Sage Friend

“This fiddle tune comes from the playing of Gribble, Lusk, and York, a Black string band from Warren County, Tennessee whose music was documented in the 1940s. I follow their lead in setting the entire melody above one droning chord - I like the way the sustained notes of the high section push and pull against that steady backdrop, leading to some unexpected dissonances.”

Program notes by Morgan Harris

Spoken interlude by teens

What We Know By Heart by Jim Hunt and David Short

Performed by:
Jim Hunt, Actor
David Short, Cello

“I've been an actor for over 50 years and a lover of poetry all my life, so my brain is chockablock with things I've memorized and retained over the decades. Six of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which are about the power of love and the pen, are in my head and,  together, chart a "stages of man" journey through life. With his cello, David will both bridge and underscore the pieces. I'm hoping it will be entertaining, poignant, and uplifting (and maybe a little dorky).”

Program notes by Jim Hunt

lightness has a call that's hard to hear by Elle Hong

Performed by:
Elle Hong, Artist
Joshua Sawicki, Piano

lightness has a call that’s hard to hear considers how external interactions shape our internal (self-)perceptions and vice versa. A performer comes out of a closet repeatedly, considering how introductions can be revealing, and simultaneously reveal even more about what is being withheld. How can we utilize the performance space as an ephemeral site for externalizing desires for transformation? Through dance, audience participation, and choral orchestration, the artist sets forth intentions for embodying lightness while demonstrating the certain impossibilities of disentangling lightness from darkness and/or heaviness.

Composer Bios

Arone Dyer

Arone Dyer does a lot of things that don’t fit in tidy boxes. She has produced sound as a vocalist, musician, composer & as a founding member of the uncategorical duo Buke and Gase since 2007, which has toured around the globe multiple times. Outside of Buke and Gase, she's founded the roving, ever-evolving, non-static Dronechoir, which continues to be performed across the US and in Europe. To support her music-habit she ventures into voiceover work, she teaches kids how to fix and ride bicycles in her community, has a landscaping side-hustle, and engages in her community as a Volunteer Firefighter.

Silen Wellington

Silen Wellington (they/he) is a sculptor of sound, artist of people, witch, genderqueer shapeshifter, mercurial story collector, and lover, among other things. Avidly interdisciplinary, they like to combine music with other art mediums, be that spoken word, visual art, ritual performance, loud and fiery eye contact, otherworldly and melting trysts, or something else entirely.

Their work has been performed in gardens whispering delightful fae dances to the trans-ancestors that escape definition. Their work has featured boys in dresses next to saxophones, prescription label collages amid chaotic soundscapes of dysphoria, nonbinary shadow puppets behind sheets of rainbow light, and intramuscular testosterone injections under expansive life-giving harmonics. It has screamed at the onslaught of xenophobic news, granulated recordings of politicians, and pleaded with white people to recognize the racialized violence of our culture. Silen’s art is never enough.

Outside of the arts world, they direct a nonprofit in Northern Colorado called the Yarrow Collective, offering peer support run by people with lived experience of mental health and/or substance use struggles. In all aspects of their life, they aim to create spaces where people feel safer to come closer to their authentic selves.

Nathan Hall

Nathan Hall is a composer and artist who explores site-specificity, nature and climate (particularly about ideas and culture of the North), sexuality, and personal identity. He has been called a “seriously talented composer” (Denver Post) and “a try-anything aural dreamer” (Westword) whose works often come out as intriguing, fearless, and courageous. He aims to create intimacy between performer, place, and audience, and often creates moments of transformation from simple stories and common materials: magic out of the everyday.

His works have been performed and exhibited in 16 countries and 24 US States by institutions and ensembles including MCA Denver, Clyfford Still Museum, Mattress Factory Museum, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, eight GALA Choruses, Playground Ensemble, International Orange Chorale, a convention of roller coaster enthusiasts, and several adult film stars. Nathan Hall is a former Fulbright Fellow to Iceland, a McKnight Visiting Composer, and he holds his Doctorate in Musical Arts (DMA) from CU Boulder. He holds a BA from Vassar College and MM from Carnegie Mellon. Nathan has been awarded numerous grants including projects with FEMA and a New Music USA grant, and has been the Artist in Residence at two US National Parks, Bunnell Street Arts (Alaska), La Napoule (France), Skaftfell (Iceland), and VICC (Sweden), among others. 

Nathan is currently Adjunct faculty in Composition at the University of Denver, and in Music Production at RMCAD. He is on the Board of Playground Ensemble, and lives in Denver with his husband Andy.

Morgan Harris

Morgan Harris (she/they) is a Portland, OR-based guitarist specializing in traditional North American stringband (or ‘old time’) music. In contrast to the purely accompanying role the guitar often occupies in this space, Morgan’s distinctive playing technique allows the guitar to shine as an old time melody instrument, creating a rhythmic drive and a multi-layered resonance that is unique in the world of flatpicked guitar. 

On Morgan’s new record Alone Will Tell (released Nov 1st, 2024), she performs a collection of traditional tunes and songs with just her guitar and voice, drawn from historic source recordings of driving fiddle breakdowns, hypnotic banjo pieces and austere mountain ballads. This is the music she has continually found herself drawn to in quiet, solitary moments, and it has been shaped by long familiarity and patient questioning. Morgan’s first release as an out trans musician, Alone Will Tell is a meditation on the transformative potential of looking inward.

Jim Hunt

Jim Hunt has been a part of the Denver and Boulder theatre scene — as an actor and director — for over 50 years. He has played the role of Selsdon in CSF's 2012 production of "Noises Off," though his last appearance on the Rippon stage was 45 years ago (1974) when he appeared in "Macbeth," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Timon of Athens." Hunt is a BETC ensemble member, having performed in eight productions, and most recently created the roles of Homer and Simon in Jessica Dickey's "The Rembrandt." At Curious Theatre—where he is an artistic company member—he played the role of Charles Ives in Jessica Dickey's "Charles Ives Take Me Home." Most recently, he has played the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" at Golden's Miners Alley Playhouse.

Elle Hong

Elle Hong is an antidisciplinary artist currently based in Cheyenne/Ute/Arapaho Territories (Denver, CO). A current resident artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (2024-26), she provides dramaturgical support for artists Helanius J. Wilkins and LA Samuelson, and has toured as a performer for Michelle Ellsworth (“Evidence of Labor”; “Post-Verbal Social Network”).

Elle’s work spans across dance, media arts, text, sound, and pedagogy, often employing queer/diasporic collaging techniques for creating performances that reenvision history and form. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, SPEKTRUM Berlin, Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), ODC Theater (San Francisco, CA), BMoCA (Boulder, CO), among others.

Elle's creative research works to uncover the embedded politics and power structures inherent to viewing and being viewed. She is invested in exposing the complex dialectic between interiority and exteriority, paving way towards new methods of being that actively resist and transcend categorization. Her work uses dance as a primary text for transcending the (representational) limitations of the body.