Highland Lights: Assembly

Highland Lights returns to celebrate five years of illuminating Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s landscape through community-built processions. Processional Arts Workshop and award-winning composer Heather Christian (Animal Wisdom, Oratorio for Living Things) are coming together to create an ambulatory performance that reflects on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Assembly evokes the foundational act of gathering and building. Through light, movement, and voice, the performance offers a moment of reflection on common values, civic imagination, and the ongoing work of forming a more expansive “we.” Rather than presenting a single argument or narrative, Assembly creates space for many histories, many perspectives, and the possibility of shared celebration.

Local participants will journey at dusk as revolutionary figures from the distant and recent past emerge to form a growing luminous serpentine puppet inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s iconic “Join or Die” image.