composing for live performance
Dance. Theatre. Cabaret. Puppetry. Parades.
The Mar Vista
Yehuda Hyman / Mystical Feet Dance Company
For this lyrical, hilarious, poignant dance theatre memoir, I provided sound design and compositions, as well as performing in the ensemble. Performances included Signature Theatre (2019), 14th St Y (2015), and the Museum of Jewish Heritage (2016). Named “Best Immigrant Saga” by the Village Voice.
Lower East Side Citizen’s Parade (2018)
Laura Nova / Dances for a Variable Population
This parade/spectacle brought together about a hundred community members in the lower east side NYC to form a “moving company,” using dance and music to share narratives of immigration and (resistance to) displacement. I collaborated with bandleader Paul Shapiro on musical direction & arrangements, and contributed three pre-recorded compositions.
bring a weasel and a pint of your own blood festival (2016)
dir. Mia Rovegno
I served as composer, music director, and sound designer for this presentation at JACK of three new short plays based on Gorky’s reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev. Musical styles ranged from Romantic to folk to… disco!
“[Rovegno] locates a joyful chaos in letting these three plays spin their source materials into wildly different directions. She finds an ideal collaborator in composer and sound designer Zera Bloom, whose work oscillates between Slavic schmaltz and genuine soulfulness.” - Eric Marlin, New York Theatre Review
Ongoing Collaborations:
Midnight Radio Show
Since 2015, I have been a Resident Composer for Midnight Radio Show, a multi-disciplinary shadow puppet collective based in Brooklyn, NY led by Charlotte Lily Gaspard. I spent several years as Music Director, writing dozens of songs and providing scores and sound design for puppet shows, cabarets, short films, and theatrical productions. Highlights include:
Multi-year recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council grants to produce free shadow puppet theater in NYC public gardens
Performances & educational workshops at New York Hall of Science, Queens Science Museum, Lower East Side Girls Club, and public schools throughout NYC
Full-scale theatrical productions at Theatre of the New City and La Mama
Touring productions to New Orleans, Dallas, Poughkeepsie
Annual self-produced cabarets for adult audiences, weaving costume/spectacle, shadow puppetry, burlesque, dance, and song into intergalactic storylines
Radio show produced for 2 years on Radio Free Brooklyn
Dances for a Variable Population
Dances for a Variable Population (DVP) is a multi-generational dance company and education program that operates free programming throughout NYC and produces multiple large-scale performances every year. I have had the pleasure of sound designing, engineering, co-producing, and composing for 10 productions, presented at Grant’s Tomb, Prospect Park, Washington Square Park, Queenside Bridge Park, Yolanda Garcia Park, and one fully virtual dance festival in 2020.