Held in a secret private residence and by invitation only, DVSSIMA'S AFTERLIVES salon is a phantasmagoria of voice, sound, and synthetic dream imagery exploring the liminal spaces between grief and love, sleep and waking, devotion and death, memory and transformation.
The evening unfolds as a sequence of emotional, psychological, and autobiographical afterlives woven through original works by composer-soprano Dr. Stephanie Susberich. Through music, storytelling, and memory, AFTERLIVES traces the successive lives contained within a single lifetime: the afterlife of love, the afterlife of illness, the afterlife of loss, the afterlife of grief, and the strange dreamlike territories that emerge in their wake.
Beginning with the final words of the Cuban poet Juana Borrero, whose poetry inspired Susberich's first compositions, the program moves through meditations on love, longing, mortality, memory, and transformation. Along the way, it encounters the lingering voices of the dead: a centuries-old Salem epitaph, the final words of the composer's father, and the vanished selves that continue to haunt the living long after their apparent disappearance.
From the hypnagogic shimmer of dream states to the hypnopompic ache of waking, AFTERLIVES inhabits the in-between: those twilight thresholds where memory becomes architecture, grief becomes music, and identity dissolves and reforms across time.
At the center of the evening is the question of what survives us. Not only in the literal sense of death, but in the dreamworlds we continue inhabiting long after a life, a love, a self, or a longing has vanished.
The afterlives of grief.
The afterlives of desire.
The afterlives of imagination itself.
Featuring guest artist Joseph Keckler, pianist Brenda Quattrini, pianist Giulia Magarelli, Matthew Jermiason on euphonium, and live visual environments created in collaboration with Etherea AI, AFTERLIVES transforms DVSSIMA into a shifting phantasmagoria of apparition, cinematic memory, dream architecture, and synthetic vision.
Widely celebrated for his singular body of work spanning opera, performance art, music, monologue, and surreal theatrical confession, Joseph Keckler is an artist whose work uniquely inhabits the liminal. Haunting, hilarious, uncanny, and emotionally devastating in equal measure, his performances move fluidly between sincerity and irony, beauty and absurdity, earthly intimacy and dreamlike estrangement. His presence within AFTERLIVES feels less like a guest appearance than an embodiment of the evening's central spirit: the artist as witness to the unseen, the subconscious, and the shimmering psychic otherworlds that persist beneath ordinary life.
Blurring recital, ritual, theater, dream, immersive installation, and phantasmagoria, AFTERLIVES invites audiences into a luminous twilight space where beauty survives catastrophe, memory becomes architecture, and art itself becomes a kind of waking afterlife.