Cloud Variations

New York, NY – Carnegie Hall and The Knights will present Cloud Variations—with music and text written by J. Mae Barizo—on October 23, 2025 at 7:30 PM at Zankel Hall. Cloud Variations is a piece for performer and chamber orchestra that reimagines poetic forms in a kaleidoscopic meditation on body, desire, environment and technology. The piece draws inspiration from the Malay oral poetic form pantun berkait.“This form resonates personally for me because Tagalog, my mother tongue, is a Malayo-Polynesian tongue; the pantun—with its structured pattern of repetition—has been an ongoing source of inspiration for my own creative process,” says Barizo, who created graphic scores to realize the work. Director George R. Miller stages the work, threading Philip Glass’s Symphony #3 and Cloud Variations into an intimate narrative where sound, text, body, and light fuse into a visceral meditation. Costume design is conceived specifically for this production by Parsons School of Design alumni and Marchesa’s Head of Couture Yuchang Xiao, whose sculptural approach to textiles merges couture craftsmanship with experimental performancewear. Cloud Variations highlights Barizo’s forays into the intersections of poetry, sound and performance in collaboration with The Knights—an intrepid and genre-defying orchestral collective that has toured with renowned soloists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Yuja Wang—as part of their season at Carnegie Hall.