As our rushing descent into global environmental catastrophe continues, we are inundated with images of our planet’s suffering. We’ve all seen the snapshots—a man up to his neck in water pushing children on a downed satellite dish during the 2022 flooding of Jaffarabad, Pakistan; corpses of giraffes dead from dehydration atop baren ground in Kenya; a skeletal polar bear stumbling across dead grass in Canada; a Tuvaluan minister standing before a podium addressing Cop26 while knee-high in seawater—the horrors go on and on. And yet, despite all the urgent calls for action, we’re still dependent on fossil fuels, celebrities still take private flights for as little as 17 minutes, and we’re still stuck in the post-9/11 mindset to “go out and shop.” With 100 corporations responsible for 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it’s hard to feel like individual actions have any impact—it’s hard to feel you can do anything other than sit and wail.

Wailing, and the myriad of similar sounds, is integral to Justen LeRoy’s recent contemporary opera, X’ene’s Witness. Presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division and directed and composed by LeRoy in collaboration with Alexander Hadyn, the performance was centered around vocalist and pianist X’ene Sky—a classical musician—and featured choreography from movement artist Qwenga. The production, which included two other dancers and a small chorus group, was a commentary on Black environmentalism and the Anthropocene. It provided —a springboard for conversations about climate change and race, a subject that, despite being disproportionately impacted, Black communities are often left out of.

LeRoy creates this dialogue without words; he allows sonic expression to convey despair, hope, and the many states in between. This sort of expression is what Fred Moten dubbed the “wordless moan,” a disembodied, gospellike expulsion of feeling. Moten describes this in his essay “Black Mo’nin,” where he quotes a passage from  Anthony Heilbut’s book The Gospel Sound, saying “The essence of the gospel style is a wordless moan. Always these words render the indescribable, implying ‘Words can’t begin to tell you, but maybe moaning will.’”

Sky’s moaning did tell. As the central vocalist, her voice seeped into each corner of the performance space, ringing against the walls and swallowing the audience—each croon begging us to watch on. The décor of the stage (which was level with the audience) was simple; two gauze curtains hung from the ceiling and a grand piano sat in between, below a cube of gauze. Along the far side of the stage were two more near-translucent curtains that separated the chorus from the stage, and the entire scene was cast in alternating colors of red and grey-blue. As Sky and the choir’s voices rang out, LeRoy and the three movement artists crept around the stage, their bodies wrenching and wringing in synchronicity with the sound as if controlled by it. The curtains were like the ghosts of towers, and as the dancers and their shadows interacted with they were literally and metaphorically grappling with a city of ruins.

Unworldly, yet grounded in humanity, the performance ended with Sky’s ethereal voice singing a mixture of semi-intelligible words and moans as she and Qwenaga moved with one another—converging and diverging before finally coming together. Sky’s moans carried the weight of a world coming down around us, but we saw a hint of hope through the performers bearing witness. Where images, campaigns and scientific proof have lagged, LeRoy’s quest to convey through sound opens up a new means of possibility.