“[My album] ‘Coldblooded’ was my response to the current times,” said mezzo-soprano and multi-dimensional artist Alicia Hall Moran. “My open, empathic heart was getting hurt every day by the news. I realized that if I could cool down my expectations, I would survive. If I could cool down my expectations then I would find a new community, a new way of communicating that was happening at a frequency a little less hot, but more self-confident, more controlled, more disciplined, filled with more ease and a cooler response. ‘Coldblooded’ is a way to encounter a cold room, and that’s what I found the country turning into in some ways.”
Hall Moran has performed on Broadway and on a national tour of “The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.” She has shared her vocal talents at venues all around New York City, including the iconic Jazz@Lincoln Center, and she has sung with orchestral backing with the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, the Chicago Philharmonic and more. Together with her husband and collaborator, Jason Moran, she was awarded a 2017 Art of Change fellowship by the Ford Foundation and has generated work for the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall. Her piece “Black Wall Street” has received national attention. Last year, she performed at the Park Avenue Armory, inside an exhibition by Yoko Ono. Hall Moran sang Ono’s 1981 song “Walking on Thin Ice” and other songs about cold with a quartet called The Hands Free, who also played on “Coldblooded.”
She has created unique pieces, some of which have included her lifelong love of figure skating. This includes, “Breaking Ice,” an alt-opera combining Bizet’s “Carmen” with Olympic figure skating. She has even created indoor skating performance art on synthetic ice.
To celebrate the release of “Coldblooded” last month, she released a video on YouTube (https://youtu.be/DxiEQk3Pa2w?si=Lr5sMJouPpCtjpzw) to one of the album’s songs, “Civil Twilight,” which combines her singing and skating along with choreographer/performer Joy Thomas, which Hall Moran described as perfect poetry. It was filmed at an ice rink in Maryland. The song is about skating on frozen lakes, a childhood friendship and the enduring connection to skating.
“Mostly ‘Coldblooded’ is a fun record (with 19 tracks—four covers, two songs written for her, and the remaining 13 written by Hall Moran) of songs from and about the colder side of things,” she said. “The reason for the record right now really has been political underpinnings. It’s about pure survival. … ‘Coldblooded’ is the exhale breath for me. Being emotionally fired up about what’s going on without doing anything about how I feel was creating this real imbalance in my body. So, when I talk about cooling everything down, it’s so that my rational mind can take over and all my actions are more precise.”
Singing is a controlled exhale with pitch, she explained. Harlem resident Hall Moran finds community at skating rinks like Riverbank State Park and the new Gottesman Rink at the Davis Center at Central Park’s north end. She also skates in the Ice Theatre of New York’s edge class at SkyRink at Chelsea Piers. When you skate, especially outdoors in winter, you can see your breath in the cold. Those become lyrics. Being on the ice is like flying through the clouds. Bringing her music to the ice allows her to physicalize her thoughts and create healing.
“I’m in this dialogue with my feelings in this visual place, and it’s been therapeutic, but it’s also given me a whole new community and a real understanding for how some things do still work and always with a coalition of many,” she said.
Earlier this month, she dropped another cool video, this one to “Everybody Wants to Be Carmen” (https://youtu.be/ezRQJ860qNU?si=II8hJwdpneXFHWMk, a skating reference to the opera and the many skaters who’ve skated to it music), which features skaters from Ice Theatre of New York and Figure Skating in Harlem alumna Zenzilé Tonge as well as dancer Olivia Bowman-Jackson. For this, Hall Moran described herself as a Black artist who lives in Harlem using Riverbank State Park and skaters in Harlem to tell stories on ice. A love of the rhythm and music of skating continues to inspire her.
“When you skate, including these public sessions, that’s a concert,” said Hall Moran. “You get to this big hall, and music is coming through the big speakers and you’re moving to it. As a teenager growing up, that’s a party. That’s freedom and liberation. It’s so loud and you’re moving so fast. It’s really exciting.
“It can be dangerous and it makes you pay attention to your feet,” she added. “Anyone who has spiritual practice of any kind knows how important it is to ground yourself. Skating is grounding for me. … I really appreciate the grounding and intention of skating. Opening my ears, opening my lungs, feeling my feet, the rhythm and the music. It’s a very musical process.”