On the phone recently after a grueling day of rehearsal, composer and indie rocker Ellis Ludwig-Leone had a bit of trouble coming up with a succinct summary for his latest work.
“Let’s wait on that,” he said with a laugh. “I’m still working that out.”
It’s hard to encapsulate Ludwig-Leone’s career in a tight description, too — he’s the founder and bandleader of San Fermin, an acclaimed Brooklyn-based group that has melded indie rock with orchestral elements for over a decade. But he has also had a parallel career over the past 15 years as a composer, writing and arranging pieces for orchestras, chamber groups, dance groups and more.
At the end of this month, Ludwig-Leone will unveil his most genre-bending project yet: The Woods, an “immersive concert experience” that will take over the main floor of Red Hook’s Pioneer Works arts space for three nights only. Tickets quickly sold out for July 31 and Aug. 1, but on Tuesday, Pioneer Works announced a third show on Aug. 2.
The Woods will feature San Fermin songs from throughout their catalogue, some original arrangements and several stages throughout the large room that will host both a scattering of musicians and professional dancers and singers.
The show resists a straightforward narrative, too (Ludwig-Leone isn’t a fan of “jukebox musicals,” or shows that create plot out of a body of songs). San Fermin members Allen Tate and Claire Wellin play two characters who enter a “witchy kind of bacchanalia,” Ludwig-Leone said, that takes place in a secluded woodsy area, where everyday people can come together to release their worries or loneliness in a group dance ritual.
“The first thought that we had was to prioritize the audience experience. So we were like, ‘Okay, how do we create a world that the audience can enter?’” Ludwig-Leone told Brooklyn Paper. “Allen and Claire as singers are kind of proxies for the audience entering this world.”
Ludwig-Leone produced the show in tandem with longtime creative partner Troy Schumacher, a member of the New York City Ballet and the founder of the BalletCollective nonprofit. But don’t call The Woods a ballet — it’s part contemporary dance, part rock show, part immersive theater.
Tate, a co-songwriter in San Fermin, also pitched in during the writing process, and Jason Ardizzone-West — who has worked on tour looks for the likes of The Weeknd, Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga — designed the set.
“I think we’re trying to do something that I haven’t seen really done,” Ludwig-Leone said.
Since 2013, San Fermin has released five albums, including 2015’s “Jackrabbit,” which begins with a track called “The Woods.” One verse of the song reads: “Your eyes were lovely, dark, and dense/Pulling legs off salamanders/A little creature you once spun/The skin and bones, and brains and blood/While witches, they surrounded us.”
On “The Cormorant,” the first track on the 2019 album “The Cormorant I,” the lyrics include:
“Waking from a dream in which/Sleeping you are visited/By a great black cormorant/His wings are vast and open wide/Razor beak and diamond eyes/The bird begins to speak/In a voice both harsh and deep/Rising from an ancient sea… ‘On this morning you will die.’”
While many of the band’s songs also focus on universal themes like love, loneliness and longing, there is a distinct magical feeling to some San Fermin albums, punctuated by theatrical — and sometimes eerie — horn and string sounds.
Ludwig-Leone, 35, grew up near wetlands in western Massachusetts and has always had a fascination with the woods. He liked catching frogs and snakes and reading “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”
“[In those stories] wonder could turn to terror so quickly. And, you know, I think that the goal with this show is to acknowledge both sides of that,” he said. “That’s what living in our society feels like. It’s such a strange mixture of beautiful, wonderful things and deeply terrifying stuff.”
He’s also a big fan of “The Odyssey” (as in the original, by Homer). In 2023, Ludwig-Leone and Schumacher teamed up to create a dance and music show for prominent novelist Karen Russell’s “The Night Falls” — about a “beautiful grotto turned into a roadside attraction where three sisters sing in kitschy bird outfits,” the New York Times wrote. Think the Sirens from “The Odyssey,” in modern-day Florida.
Ludwig-Leone enjoyed the long rehearsals before that show, because they brought the cast and musicians closer together — and he enjoyed fusing the two strands of his musical life into one production. He wants to tour The Woods across the country and eventually sees it being set up in a residency somewhere in New York.
“It just felt very clarifying to me, that that was the kind of scale that I wanted to write music at,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll be the start of a new fun chapter for the band.”
By the end of our conversation, Ludwig-Leone wasn’t too much closer in figuring out how to describe The Woods.
“It’s sort of like [the horror film] ‘Midsommar,’ without any of the murders,” he quipped.
