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![[morning//mourning]](http://indiepubs.com/cdn/shop/files/CoreSourceHub_f0cf063f-5b26-48d2-8017-7b918adb00a9.jpg?v=1779204743&width=1445)
A cry in the dark, gentle yet penetrating…sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable.
—New York Times
mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] is a performance text for an experimental opera that tells the story of what would transpire if all humans disappeared from Earth, starting in the present day and moving to 1.6 billion years into the future when life can no longer survive on the planet. Five characters guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. This work is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.
Playful and serious, funny and biting, alien and marvelously human…A wonderful, uncategorizable guide to what might unfold on Earth in the millions and billions of years after human history.
—Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
A dazzling, uncategorizable work that spans geologic time…Part scientific exposition, part imaginative flight of fancy.
—Heidi Waleson, Wall Street Journal
This is storytelling in the ancient manner of narrative poetry but with a modern sensibility…A work of speculative history on a geologic and even cosmic scale…Bell’s narrative is both plain and rich, like the simplest band of the most refined gold.
—George Grella, New York Classical Review
Sexily sinister, celestial and otherworldly, synth-y and noisy, folksy, operatic, and on and on…Bell, who provided the libretto, music, sang, and played, seems to be one of these enviable renaissance women who can create something at once daring in both vision and style and utterly unpretentious.
Gabrielle Ferrari, Parterre Box
Gelsey Bell (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, playwright, and vocalist. Her recent works include the experimental opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), commissioned by the HERE Arts Center and presented in the Prototype Festival; Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery; the musical one-act Archaeopteris (2025), commissioned by Wet Ink; and thingNY’s collaboratively written opera Mouthful (2024). She has released multiple albums, including the recent mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Skylighght, and Heads Together. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, Herb Alpert/Ucross, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Japan Foundation, NYSCA, and others. Performance highlights include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Off-Broadway, etc.) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Foreign Experiences and Improvement, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Alaina Ferris’s The Lydian Gale Parr, Aaron Siegel’s Rainbird, and other works by Jay Afrisando, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Dan Trueman, and others. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU and has published articles in TDR/The Drama Review (for which she is a contributing editor), The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (for which she is an associate editor), Tempo, Performance Research, and others.