DESTROY

Queer art-rock ensemble Zara melds music, cinema, immersive technology, performance, and world-building in DESTROY, a new speculative work developed during their B2 residency. This transdisciplinary performance pushes beyond the traditional concert experience, exploring the intersection ofliveness and mediation. Drawing inspiration from works like Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave and The Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Zara is constructing a world around their new album, also entitled DESTROY. This will culminate in a performance film, captured live at B2 on March 26, 2027.

Building on the creative momentum of their 2025 release Unmasking Music, Zara's DESTROY reclaims narratives surrounding the complex existences of trans/queer bodies surviving under oppressive systems, cultures, and infrastructures. DESTROY is an urgent response to our current national and geopolitical moment, exploring themes of power versus force, resistance, queer futurism, and collective transformation. The work seizes narrative control by embracing an ex post facto villainy, telling a story of reclaiming agency by "making the revolution irresistible." It pushes back against moral panics, straddling narrative discourses of trans villainization and humanization through the use of X-rays, illuminated costumes, live music, storytelling, and immersive sound and projection systems.

Queer, art-rock ensemble Zara blends alt-rock genres with cinematic and symphonic sensibilities. Zara was founded by Seattle-based artist, Max Zara Bernstein (she/they). Bernstein received a BA in Media Study with a concentration in Film and Video Production, from the University at Buffalo, and an MFA in Film Production from CU Boulder. She has also designed, performed and toured as a video and sound designer and composer with The Wooster Group, Michelle Ellsworth, Laurie Andersion, Annie Dorsen, Kaki King, Cindy Kleine, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Sam Kim, Morgan Gould, Becca Blackwell, and James Allister Sprang. Bernstein’s research and productions explore intersections of liveness and mediation, exploded cinema, queer futurism, post-human and eco-centric philosophies, the body and the sea. Bernstein is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Film and Emerging Media in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at ASU. While Bernstein is the primary composer, arranger, producer and designer for Zara, Zara’s live ensemble includes Dave Braun on drums, Brooke White on bass, Henry Mansfield on keyboards, Nikhita Sheller on saxophone, Anuj Pant on Guitar, Peter Nelson-King on baritone and trumpet, and julz on Viola, and Max Zara Bernstein on guitar and vocals.

David Braun is a Seattle-based artist, and drummer, and keeper of the Spectral Scepters. Dave’s works explore death, inner and outer spaces, comic books, and the cult of Elevendiyism among various other belief systems.

Brooke White is a Seattle born musician, songwriter and audio engineer. They perform live with many acts including Zara and The Red Permanence, and write and perform their own material as Fruitless Worship. Their Goal, musically and otherwise, is to meet chaos with understanding and bring people together through the shared beauty of suffering.

Henry Mansfield is a singer/songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, ushering in the next wave of queer, anthemic indie rock. A storyteller by nature, Mansfield’s songs examine the grief and joy of modern connection.

Nikhita Sheller is a multifaceted creative and musicologist, who values music as a medium for human connection. Living out the principle of service through musicianship, their work focuses on expanding environmental and social sustainability within the music industry.

julz is an interdisciplinary artist and musician. julz's work explores the possibilities afforded through the combination of sound, sight, and sensation.

Tess Skye is a lighting and video designer, and musician, working with various artists and performers including Underscores.

Jacob Cona is a Seattle-based musician and sound engineer. Jacob is the leader of the indie-rock music project Larches, and frequently runs FOH sound for spaces including the Crocodile and Tractor Tavern in Seattle, WA.

Katrina Hess has been making custom outerwear and costumes in Seattle since 2010. She revels at the opportunity to dress the secret agents, replicants, and cylons among us.

Dakota Seabourn is an Analog photographer, motion picture filmmaker, sound designer, and VP of the Seattle chapter of Dykes on Bikes.