The Crossing to Give World Premiere of 'How to Survive' in Philadelphia

The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, will present the world premiere of Suzanne Bocanegra's multimedia installation "How to Survive" at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, running Nov. 20, 2026, through Jan. 3, 2027.

The Grammy-winning chamber choir joins forces with Bocanegra, an interdisciplinary artist and writer, for a work that confronts survival in a world where extreme weather is, in the creators' words, increasingly familiar and increasingly devastating. Bocanegra conceived, wrote and designed the installation herself.

What will audiences actually experience?

The installation turns The Crossing's singers into a life-size visual and sonic environment. Four new musical works anchor the piece, each responding to a different natural disaster: tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires. The composers are Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, Julia Wolfe and Ayanna Woods.

Audiences will be asked to imagine themselves inside a climate disaster. Practical survival instructions will appear alongside the music and moving images. The organizers describe the result as unsettling, darkly humorous, intimate and deeply human — a broad range of registers that the finished installation will have to hold together.

What does the work change for the choir?

It moves The Crossing off the concert platform and into a gallery setting, where visitors will encounter singers as part of an installation rather than a conventional performance. That shift is the project's real wager.

Nally said in a statement: "The disasters that shape How to Survive are no longer hypothetical. They are part of the world we inhabit. This multimedia project gives us a way to think about that reality together—not through statistics or headlines alone, but through music, image, voice and the very human act of trying to understand what happens when the world changes beneath us."

Bocanegra framed the piece around questions of uncertainty. "'How to Survive' sits at the intersection of everything we are asking ourselves right now," she said. "How do we live with uncertainty? How do we prepare for what we cannot predict? And how do we remain connected to one another when the forces around us seem beyond our control? The choir gives those questions a human voice."

She added a practical note on method: "It's hard to know what to do in an emergency. I thought if I wrote instructions for how to react in these situations, having them sung would make the instructions easier to remember."

That claim — that sung instructions stick better than printed ones — is the project's most testable premise, and one the Philadelphia run may quietly answer.

No further programming details, ticketing information or plans for a tour beyond Philadelphia have been announced.