It’s easy to think of the moth as the boring, less colorful relative of the butterfly. But The Moth Project explores the forgotten insect with new levels of music and videography.
The Moth Project began on Oct. 24 at the Overture Center with a white background and two performers, Peter Kiesewalter, dressed in white with dark-shaded, white-rimmed sunglasses, and his partner Whitney La Grange. Kiesewalter expressed gratitude for being able to perform at the Overture Center and poked at the similarities between the Midwest and Ottawa, Canada, where The Moth Project was conceived — the abundance of natural beauty, the weather and even some of the same moth species.
Then, the lights dimmed. Kiesewalter walked to the electric piano as La Grange got into position on the violin. The first song came to life on the screen with a visual of the spinning planet Earth: “Welcome to My Haus.” The title of the song hints at Kiesewalter’s German heritage and the tone of the show, which is equal parts playful and personal.
Moths transitioned from nocturnal insect to lifestyle quickly for Kiesewalter when his brother, an interpretive naturalist, started collecting photographs of them during pandemic season in Canada. Kiesewatler proudly displayed his collection of moth photographs. Among his favorites is the luna moth, a green beauty with eyespots like half-moons on its wings, a type of moth that emerges from its cocoon with vestigial mouthparts and thus only days or hours to live.
And what they do with that time, mostly, is have sex. The emergence and subsequent activities of the moth inspire two songs. The first is “Emergence,” a poppy, upbeat track with a motif reminiscent of “Flight of the Bumblebee” in the twenty-first century. Kiesewalter powered on the piano and vocals (hitting some impressive high notes), and La Grange played the difficult song on the violin with impressive consistency.
The second song is “Pheromones,” a slow love song which starts with Kiesewalter crooning into a vocoder and features videos of intimate moth activities.
Throughout the show, the lyrics continually surprised the audience. I especially enjoyed listening to “Death,” a mashup of KISS’s “Beth,” a Virginia Woolf essay about the death of a moth and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Kiesewalter’s creativity came from an online thesaurus, painstaking hours of songwriting and science tips from his brother.
Sometimes humorous and other times deeply personal, The Moth Project is fresh, experimental and most of all, fun. With the show, Kiesewalter aimed to raise viewers’ awareness about the natural world.
It is a significant tonal shift from most media in the environmentalism movement, which tends to be negative. The Moth Project, on the other hand, celebrates the natural world. I left wanting to learn more about moths, and I had a more concrete idea of who I would be protecting by living sustainably.
Kiesewater said botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer inspired parts of the show. Her voice is featured in the song “Reciprocity,” reading a chapter of her book “Braiding Sweetgrass” while La Grange plays a beautiful rendition of “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy.
Like “Braiding Sweetgrass,” The Moth Project has a more positive and hopeful mood than a plain call-to-action. As Kimmerer tries to inject emotionality and a sense of being into her gardens, Kiesewalter tells not just the facts but the story of the moth, whether it is just emerging from a cocoon, traveling great distances or immolating itself on a flame, allowing people to see themselves in the creatures.
During the show, as expected, Kiesewalter spent a lot of time talking about moths. But he also found a way to connect their journeys to the human condition.
For example, the moth’s migration was framed as an allegory for Kiesewalter’s parents’ immigration from Germany to Canada in the 1950s. The song “Emergence,” Kiesewalter said, alludes to the experience of coming out. The show ended with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “The Case of You” set to pictures of Kiesewalter’s family. From zydeco to classical to pop, the protean music reflected the diversity of moth species in the show’s videography. Peter Kiesewalter played an electric piano and sang, while La Grange, a Juilliard-trained violinist, played hauntingly beautiful melodies.
Kiesewalter’s subject matter was similarly diverse, musing about moths’ motivations to kill themselves over flames in “Immolation,” the process of exiting the cocoon in “Emergence” and comparing their journeys to human migration in “Migration.”
The song and videography of “Flight” was a standout — a series of high-res, slow-motion videos of moths jumping into the air with their wings fanning out behind them.
If scientists are looking for a way to make people pay attention to nature again, The Moth Project is doing the right work. It is the antithesis of a dry list of facts or a compilation of depressing statistics. It is a performance with a human dimension, one full of excitement, contemplation and joy.
