Uncharted ’26: Night 3

The Storytellers: Featuring Erika Ji & Miriam Elhajli Erika Ji Website / Instagram Show Description: For her Uncharted performance, Erika Ji presents four; interwoven, a 30-minute quartet piece exploring what it means to choose love and togetherness, especially when that choice is difficult. Blurring the lines between folk band, theater troupe, and choral quartet, four musician-storytellers weave composed music, devised performance, and improvisation to examine the tension between individuality and collectivity. Through layered voices, instruments, movement, and moments of wordless song, the piece creates an embodied sound world that invites reflection on our roles within groups, our relationships with loved ones, and our ties to nation and society. four; interwoven ultimately asks what it means to belong—and to choose love. Bio: Erika Ji is a cross-genre composer-storyteller whose work has been supported by the National Music Theater Conference, the National Alliance for Musical Theater, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She, Clare Fuyuko Bierman, and Brandy Hoang Collier are the Vivace Award-winning creators of Yoko’s Husband’s Killer’s Japanese Wife, Gloria, which was commissioned by the 5th Avenue Theatre, developed at the O’Neill, and presented at the National Festival of New Musicals. Erika’s collaborative projects include VISARE (New Voices Winner, Tokyo International Showcase), Starsong (Rattlestick Theater), (NYFA Grant), and Passage (NYSCA Commission), and four;interwoven, (New Musical Theater Project Commission). The proud daughter of Chinese immigrants, Erika grew up in Palo Alto, studied computer science and philosophy at Stanford University, and built products at Dropbox before deciding to follow the music.    Miriam Elhajli Website / Instagram Show Description: For her Uncharted performance, Miriam Elhajli presents a set of newly written solo work alongside collaborative pieces with Cuban pianist Victor Campbell, currently based in New Orleans. Together, they explore material rooted in Cuban, Venezuelan, and Argentine musical traditions. The performance also features special appearances by Uncharted alum Mafer Bandola (bandola) and Willie Quintana (percussion) on select songs, expanding the set into a layered, communal exploration of voice, place, and shared musical language. Bio: Miriam Elhajli is a song-improviser, geographer, and musicologist based in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She works as a researcher at the Association for Cultural Equity and teaches at Citylore, a nonprofit dedicated to the transmission of folklore in public schools. Elhajli has performed everywhere from carpeted basements and living rooms to Lincoln Center, the Noguchi Museum, miso factories, women’s prisons, and alleyways across the Lower East Side and is set to perform at Big Ears in March 2026. Her current work explores cross-cultural creation myths, traditional shepherd routes in Catalonia, extractivism, and glossolalia through voice-dri...