Ithaca College

Filmmaker Sarah Hennies will introduce her new film "Contralto," a film and sound work that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary, at 6 pm on Tuesday April 10 in the Handwerker Gallery.

The piece features a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes a variety of conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making, using instruments such as paper, bowls of grains, office equipment, etc. The cast of the film includes several clients of the Ithaca College Voice and Communication Modification Program for People in the Transgender Community, offered to aid transgender people in finding a speaking voice that is more suited to their identity. “Contralto” - defined in musical terms as “the lowest female singing voice” - uses the sound of trans women’s voices to explore trans identity from the inside and expose a profound and queer relationship between gender and experimental sound studies.

The film was made possible by Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and New York Foundation for the Arts Shelley Pinz Professional Development Grant. 

See the calendar listing.

The Out of the Closet and Onto the Screen series is sponsored by the Ithaca College Center for LGBT Education, Outreach and Services. For more information, visit www.ithaca.edu/lgbt.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Luca Maurer at lmaurer@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-7394. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.