About the artists

Jesse Hawley and James Stanley are longtime collaborators and creative partners who have been making music, theater and visual art together since 1997. From 2000 to 2017, they created immersive spectacles and material artifacts with the NYC-based OBIE- winning collaborative National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). Their recent New England based works include their living room show House Warming (2017), a community spectacle The Olneyville Expo (2019, w/Darcie Dennigan) and their trans-media piece CVK: Extended Play (2023) which consisted of an album, an historical essay, live shows and concert ephemera for a band that never existed.

sea monsters

Jesse Hawley and James Stanley

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Website: https://www.hawleyandstanley.org/​

CATEGORY:
​Music, Theater

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DESCRIPTION OF PIECE:

Sea Monsters is a theatrical song cycle written and performed live by Jesse Hawley & James Stanley (and friends). With songs and stories, and they summon every variety of dark demon of the deep hell-bent on destroying the lives of the unfortunate and land-dwelling. Sirens, Krakens, Leviathans, the mythological Charybdis, the hagfish (the most disgusting creature in the sea) or the Hydra – these are the stuff of nightmares that have in equal parts repulsed and inspired the creators of Sea Monsters. Embodying a mix of haggard sea captain, ship figurehead, and long-drowned Victorian waif, Hawley and Stanley use live instruments, loops, samples, close harmonies and musical layering to (much like the monsters) to lure audiences into a stormy deep that may or may not parallel torments in the here and now.