The Crossing conducted by Donald Nally will join forces with acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and writer Suzanne Bocanegra for “How to Survive,” a multimedia installation that confronts questions about what it means to survive in a world where extreme weather is becoming increasingly familiar—and increasingly devastating.

The world premiere will be on view Nov. 20, 2026, through Jan. 3, 2027, at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Conceived, written and designed by Bocanegra, “How to Survive” will transform The Crossing’s singers into a life-size, visual and sonic experience. Four new musical works, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, Julia Wolfe and Ayanna Woods, will form the backbone of the installation, with each movement responding to a different natural disaster: tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires.

The installation will ask audiences to imagine themselves inside the climate disaster. Practical survival instructions will appear alongside music and moving images, creating an experience that is at once unsettling, darkly humorous, intimate, and deeply human.

In a statement Nally aid, “The disasters that shape How to Survive are no longer hypothetical. They are part of the world we inhabit. This multimedia project gives us a way to think about that reality together—not through statistics or headlines alone, but through music, image, voice and the very human act of trying to understand what happens when the world changes beneath us.”

Boccanegra added, “’How to Survive’ sits at the intersection of everything we are asking ourselves right now. How do we live with uncertainty? How do we prepare for what we cannot predict? And how do we remain connected to one another when the forces around us seem beyond our control? The choir gives those questions a human voice. It’s hard to know what to do in an emergency. I thought if I wrote instructions for how to react in these situations, having them sung would make the instructions easier to remember.”