Inner Landscapes: Music for Mental Health Awareness (in DUMBO)

This solo cello program is presented in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month. It is a deeply personal and reflective journey through the many emotional and psychological states we navigate in our inner lives. Through music, this program traces a path across shifting mental landscapes. Moving through rumination, nostalgia, grief, and solitude, toward grounding, acceptance, hope, and contentment.

Selected works by composers including Jessica Meyer, Caroline Shaw, Philip Glass and J.S Bach, reflect a wide spectrum of the human emotional experience. Each piece serves as a lens into a particular state of mind, inviting listeners to recognize, sit with, and reflect on their own inner worlds.

This performance is both a personal narrative and an open invitation: to listen deeply, to feel without judgment, and to recognize the full spectrum of mental and emotional experience. Music becomes not just an art form, but a practice of awareness; one that holds space for complexity, contradiction, and, ultimately, hope.

What's the music?

Dara Hankins

           *Additional works to be announced from the stage*