Michigan is Magical.
This month our blog features Vice Versa Co-Founder Elena Collins!
Reflect on your current artistic practice: What are you working on? What are you passionate about? How does your work relate to Vice Versa’s mission?
In November of 2021, my grandmother Ione Collins passed away. It was sudden. No one was ready. I went to the funeral where what seemed like hundreds of people gathered at her and my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. And then I went back to school in Indiana to finish the semester.
In January of the following year, I started working on “Dear Grandma: The Letter I Couldn’t Write,” a piece consisting of recordings I made at my grandmother’s farm: the dishes, the meals, the walks along gravel roads, the dogs, the waves of Lake Michigan, etc. I then composed and improvised some piano music to go on top of it. You can listen/watch the piece here:
After I finished this piece, I knew it was the start of a collection of pieces all about my childhood and memories in Michigan. So I started writing and didn’t stop until about June of 2026. Then in August of 2026, I got to premiere my music combined with dance and visual art in my own show at Greenwood Social Hall in Kansas City, Missouri.
It was magical.
I wrote music for everything: a clarinet piece for grandma, a piano piece for my grandfather, a guitar piece for my childhood. I even sang songs I loved growing up, and I did it all surrounded by my friends here in KC. If you want to learn all about the pieces, I have attached the program notes from the show.
When I was writing all this music, I knew it needed more than just music. These ideas, these feelings, these memories were more than just sounds. So, I asked my friend Olivia Emert to choreograph dances to go along with my pieces and got my dancer friends Anna Boehm, Nora Burkitt-Davis, and Christine Kraus involved too. And then I asked my friend Polina Sokolova to create a visual piece of art during the show. I even got my audio technician friend Jenna Dolinger and lighting designer friend Kristina Banton involved. And finally I needed a photographer to capture it all, Hannah Goodwin (all these photos are hers). I wanted the audience to feel fully enveloped in my show. I wanted them to be able to watch, listen, and experience the show from multiple different viewpoints: music, dance, and visual art.
This combining of disciplines is at the core of what Vice Versa does – intertwine the various art forms to create something new.
Another big part of my show was improvisation, another vital component of Vice Versa shows. Each of my pieces involved some combination of composed and improvised parts. Sometimes, I was reading music I had written out (painstakingly) while other times I was just going with the flow and playing whatever piano notes/chords felt right in the moment. The same went for the dancers: they had planned some parts but left other parts up to the moment.
Vice Versa loves doing this: structuring certain things while leaving the piece up for improvisation in the moment. We love having a flexible structure to play in.
For my show, after playing all my sad, emotional, sentimental music, I wanted to have a second half that brought the audience out of that mood. So I had a sing-a-long.
As a kid, my family always wanted me to play guitar and sing songs. My mom was always having me play some instrument for the family and my aunts and uncles were always asking (and usually receiving) a sing-a-long. But fun fact, I was always too scared to actually sing, so I only ever just played. But a few years ago, I wanted to start singing, so I made it a goal of mine. So, the second half of my show was my motivation to help me achieve goal.
I asked a few of my close friends (Jake Hausen, Audrey Hartwell, and Jenna Dolinger) to
learn some songs with me: I told them “let’s learn a song that you love, that you grew up singing, or a song that you just really want to sing.” So, we played songs from The Beatles to Don McLean to Noah Kahan. It was awesome. I’ve never felt more comfortable on stage than I did that night singing songs with my friends and playing guitar.
It was freeing. There were no rules, no expectations, no grades. As someone who went to school and was graded on every performance on clarinet, playing guitar simply for fun was incredible.
Vice Versa shows make me feel the same way: free. We do shows with no constraints, no rules. We simply gather together as artists and make a show that we are passionate about. Sometimes it’s hard to do that in the arts, so I’m incredibly thankful I have Vice Versa as my outlet in that way.
My show “Michigan” was directly inspired by the kind of work Vice Versa does. I wanted to bring together artists from different mediums and create meaningful art through improvisation and collaboration. I also wanted to engage with themes that many people can relate to: grief, family, childhood, love. But most importantly I wanted to honor the childhood that was given and created for me by my grandparents, Michigan’s lakes, farm lands, and forests. Michigan was and always will be magical.
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