Otherworld Performance Lab: Lisa Bella Donna

Composed for Columbus’s scintillating Otherworld art installation, Mysterious Incantations explores the space’s breathtaking atmosphere. “I couldn’t wait to evoke my own sonic alchemy in such a sprawling, majestic environment,” Bella Donna says. “I wanted to create lush crosscurrents of time and temperament, a celestial storm of wonder and discovery, an extensive meditation of stereo images within the wilderness of sound.”

Enjoy a Q&A between local poet Amy Turn Sharp and Lisa Bella Donna after the performance.

More about the artist

Lisa Bella Donna is a renowned recording artist, composer, modular synthesist, sound designer, educator, and clinician. She has decades of experience as a multi-instrumentalist and session musician and has developed extensive techniques with musique concrète, modular synthesis, analogue recording and mixing techniques, microtonal music, orchestration, and film composition. Bella Donna has traveled throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe performing concerts and conducting workshops and has been commissioned for many multichannel audio art installations in the United States and Europe.

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View the Otherworld Performance Lab lineup.

More about the series

Otherworld Performance Lab is an experimental, creative collaboration of makers, artists, musicians, and dreamers whose work unfolds inside Columbus’s magical, immersive art installation, Otherworld.

In this three-part series, Bella Donna and others enter our virtual laboratory to perform from one of Otherworld’s wondrous and surreal spaces. Dubbed one of the “world’s coolest places” in 2019 by Time magazine, the 32,000-square-foot museum blends science fiction and fantasy with its dizzying array of mixed-reality playgrounds, secret passageways, and rooms of large-scale, interactive installations. Experience its wonder from the comfort of home at this not-to-be-missed, prerecorded event.

Audio production for Otherworld Performance Lab is provided by Secret Studio in Franklinton, a multipurpose studio/salon for creative audio recording, workshops, and art events. Owners Keith Hanlon and Amy Turn Sharp work to design opportunities for creativity and community to merge and flourish.

Video production is provided by the Columbus-based creative production team GHØST LABEL, comprised of GHØSTs from the shadow realm who have created rad video content and worked with humanity to solve pizza-related crimes for nearly a decade.