About this Event
Jim Nollman and Christian Swenson are two life-long performance and interspecies artists whose work spans both the beaten and the unbeaten paths. Jim is a Friday Harbor local, with a worldwide reputation for playing and composing music with animals that include turkeys, orcas, wolves, belugas and kangaroo rats. Seattleite Christian, who operates under the rubric of "Human Jazz", has been a mainstay of the PacNW art scene for 40 years, and has developed a unique fusion of dance, singing, and acting to redefine the relationship between movement and speech.
In performance, both men evince composer John Cage's trickster statement that "art is anything you can get away with." Jim and Christian once toured the world together to wild applause, but they have not performed onstage together for over 25 years!
Alchemy Art Center now brings these two transformative artists back together again at the Lavender Farm for an evening entitled "Mr. Interspecies Meets Human Jazz," featuring dance, music, readings, and audience Q&A at 7 pm on Friday, December 4.
Doors open at 6:30 pm, so come early to browse the Alchemy Store, which will also be open after the show. The store offers Jim's art prints, cards, books, CDs and vinyl, as well as our line of handcrafted lavender products, local art, and Lopez Island Creamery Ice Cream.
Featured in The New Yorker (August 2026): "Jim Nollman's Orca-stra"
A Note on Ticket Pricing: We are offering sliding scale tickets in order to keep our offerings accessible to as many community members as possible. There are three price tiers. Sustaining tickets help us continue to invest in programming. Full price tickets cover the costs associated with running classes. Accessibility tickets are priced below what it costs for us to run an event. If the cost of a full price ticket is a hardship, we encourage you to purchase a sliding scale ticket. If you can pay the full price or sustaining price, please choose that option so we can keep providing arts programming to the community.
Event venue & nearby stays
Alchemy Art Center - Field Campus, 45 Hawthorne Lane, Friday Harbor, United States
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