Photography by Jon Creamer

Root Song

“I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview – stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.” | Robin Wall Kimmerer

To be premiered in May, 2026 among the oaks and maples at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, Root Song will interweave live vocal chamber music and storytelling to create an embodied experience of listening to the wisdom of our forests. This interdisciplinary project seeks to illuminate a path back to a reciprocal relationship with the natural world by attending to what the trees and the original stewards of this land have to teach us about living in community.

Illuminated by ground-breaking research in plant communication and sentience, Western science is recognizing what Indigenous cultures have understood for millenia, that all life is intimately interconnected and teeming with a diversity of intelligences other than our own. Root Song asks how the deep listening of a musical and storytelling experience can be a bridge to remembering how to listen to and learn from our nonhuman kin, that we may safeguard the tapestry of life on Earth before it unravels beyond repair.

Root Song is conceived and directed by Jazimina Creamer-MacNeil and presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in collaboration with ArtPhilly. The premiere will open ArtPhilly’s open What Now festival in 2026: a five-week interdisciplinary arts festival commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with an eye to the country’s next 250 years.

May 29-31, 2026

Panel Discussion with Dr. Suzanne Simard and Robin Wall Kimmerer

World Premiere of work for Roomful of Teeth and storyteller Tchin by composer Christopher Theofanidis and poet Melissa Studdard