BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC at Topanga Tower

Part of LA Phil’s Ritual festival, curated by Esa-Pekka Salonen
Coproduced by LA Phil Insight, Liquid Music, and Studio Dimitri Chamblas

A pilgrimage. A progression.

BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC transforms the decommissioned Topanga Tower into a living instrument, invoking sound and movement as part of a communal artistic rite. Conceived and directed by creative partners Kate Nordstrum and Dimitri Chamblas, the experience unfolds across terrain and architecture, guiding audiences from daylight into dusk in a deliberate progression of gathering, activation, and release.

From city to sea, body to horizon, gesture to vibration, BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC at Topanga Tower offers an intensifying arc of visceral perception.

Spring 2027. Program details to be announced August 2026.

About BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC

Choreographer/director/producer Dimitri Chamblas (Paris Opera, CalArts, Studio Dimitri Chamblas) and curator/artistic director/producer Kate Nordstrum (Liquid Music, Boston Symphony Orchestra) join practices with BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC, an ongoing venture dedicated to site-inspired performance projects that meld music, movement, and environment in extraordinary ways. Together they focus on artistic and natural landscapes that center body and sound with a commitment to ‘shared reality’—communal art experiences of the highest caliber.

Chamblas and Nordstrum began collaborating in 2019. A defining project of their 2025.26 season is an expansive staging of environmentalist composer John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground for 40 musicians, unfolding across distinctive landscapes nationwide—from a natural amphitheater in Southwest Utah (October 2025), to Elysian Park overlooking downtown Los Angeles (April 2026), to Tanglewood in the Berkshires (August 2026). Each iteration reimagines the work in direct dialogue with its environment, inviting audiences into a deeply embodied convergence of sound, movement, and place.  

Combined, their work has been presented by leading cultural institutions (Los Angeles Philharmonic, Opéra national de Paris, Brooklyn Academy of Music, MOCA Los Angeles, Carnegie Hall, The Barbican, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, Musée du Louvre, Performa, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, MASS MoCA, Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, Centre Pompidou) and iconic brands (Chanel, Longchamp, Dom Perignon, Van Cleef & Arpels) in natural sites, historic halls, abandoned structures, floating cinemas, frozen lakes, fashion runways, public parks, and architectural wonders.

About Topanga Tower

SALT House was originally built as a telecommunications relay tower connecting long distance telephone and television signals from Los Angeles to the rest of the country. It was abandoned in the late 1990s as this technology became obsolete. The owners bought it after a period of neglect when it was covered in graffiti and surrounded by broken glass and trash. The main goal of their renovation is to engage the solid mass with a dark interior with the surrounding land, air and sky. The outcome maintains the integrity of a brutalist, formal concrete building while simultaneously filling the space with light; and physical and visual access to the outdoors. Employing an editing and tending process, the gardens utilize only native rocks, soil and plants. The landscape is an evolving and organic experiment that reflects and engages the surrounding Chaparral ecosystem.