Songs of the Scorpion

song cycle / installation

Songs of the Scorpion is a site-specific operatic song suite for soprano, viola, and cello, composed and performed by Danielle Birrittella with text by Claressinka Anderson and orchestration by David Fraley. The piece was staged as a desert installation in Borrego Springs in collaboration with visual artist Fay Ray. Drawing from Anderson’s poetry and the harsh beauty of the desert landscape, the work gives voice to a scorpion-mother figure—a mythic embodiment of survival, sorrow, and transformation. The piece reflects on creativity, birth, and embodiment as elemental processes, with the voice serving as both narrator and vessel.

Commissioned by CANDLEWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL

Scorpius by Claressinka Anderson

The sky will make itself known to my body
—find me with its light.
I collect the moon, 

turn it to blue, to green—
my entire torso an eye,
watching us.

Do my limbs glow 
so bright I must stow 
away in the shadows?

In my chest, 
even the stars are dying
—my sorrow a constellation 
as I birth this skin.