Two years after 21-year-old Starllie Swonyoung was struck and killed in a hit-and-run while walking along the shoulder of Route 9W in Saugerties, the loss continues to reverberate through her family and a wide circle of musicians, artists, and friends.
This weekend, that grief will again be carried into public life through music, film, and creative collaboration.
Lovesphere, the long-running experimental performance event with roots in New York City’s downtown arts scene, will unfold in Saugerties on Saturday, March 21, and Sunday, March 22. The weekend will begin with a screening of the 1971 animated cult film “The Point” at the Orpheum, followed by a brief safety discussion and a walk in remembrance of Starllie. It will continue Sunday at The Local with a multidisciplinary performance.
Organizers said a $30 donation is suggested for Sunday’s event, with proceeds benefiting Safe Pass Ulster, a coalition of county residents working to address transportation inequities that place vulnerable road users at greater risk of injury or death.
For organizer Emmallyea Swonyoung, Starllie’s mother, the gathering has become both a memorial and a way to transform grief into art and community.
“The only way to celebrate her birthday or her life was to have the Lovesphere here,” she said.
Saturday’s screening of “The Point”—a psychedelic, anti-materialist animated film written by Harry Nilsson and directed by Fred Wolf—is part of the Orpheum’s Community Kernels initiative. Organizers said popcorn proceeds from the screening will benefit Families for Safe Streets, a nonprofit that supports people affected by traffic violence.
The Sunday segment tied to the vernal equinox has taken many forms over its three-decade run—musical theater, improvisational happenings, art installations, and marathon musical performances. Organizers say its spirit has remained the same.
“It’s definitely different every single time,” Swonyoung said. “She was definitely a child of the Lovesphere.”
Swonyoung said the grief hasn’t faded. She said she still struggles to cross the street. She also said her own mother died soon after, a loss she believes was tied to the heartbreak. The driver who struck Starllie Swonyoung was sentenced to up to seven years in state prison.
In recent years, Lovesphere has also become bound up with advocacy around traffic safety and vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and people using mobility devices. Organizers said that work is inseparable from the circumstances of Starllie’s death.
“We’re asking for people to slow down,” Swonyoung said.
Swonyoung said the speed of traffic along Route 9W makes the roadway especially dangerous.
According to traffic safety research, the risk of fatal injury rises dramatically at higher speeds, with pedestrians far less likely to survive collisions above 30 miles per hour.
“What I’d like to see is prevention,” she said.
Town and village officials said Saugerties has taken a number of steps aimed at improving pedestrian safety, including added patrols, traffic signs, striping, stop signs, crosswalks, and sidewalk repairs. Village Mayor Bill Murphy said the village has also long maintained crossing guards near schools and busy intersections in the morning and afternoon on school days, and has added pedestrian crosswalks near schools and churches.
Murphy said the village lowered its overall speed limit from 30 to 25 mph, the lowest generally permitted under state law. He said officials would support lower speeds if they could, but state law does not allow municipalities to set a general speed limit below 25 mph.
He also said the area near the school on Main Street once effectively functioned as a 15 mph zone during school hours, but that changed after a traffic-light intersection was installed there. Because the roadway is state-controlled, he said, local officials do not have full authority over speed-setting and design decisions.
“We’re very conscious of this,” Murphy said.
Dan Gaydos, a Kingston musician who has been involved with Lovesphere since its early years, put it more bluntly.
“It’s 100% avoidable,” he said of traffic violence.
Federal safety data underscores that point. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 8,000 pedestrians were killed in crashes involving motor vehicles in the United States in 2022, and identifies speed as a major risk factor in both whether a pedestrian is struck and how severe the injuries are. The agency says pedestrian injuries and deaths are preventable.
The issue has also surfaced close to home. In Barclay Heights, a Saugerties neighborhood, residents recently urged town officials to address what they described as chronic speeding on narrow residential roads with blind curves, citing near misses involving children, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Town officials said at the time that traffic safety challenges were widespread across Saugerties.
Gaydos, who helped start the old Museum of Sound Recording in Brooklyn, said Lovesphere grew out of a scene committed to experimentation and new work. Now, he said, the Hudson Valley has become fertile ground for its latest chapter.
“The creative juice is strong in this part of the world,” he said.
Sunday’s performers include Saugerties Sings Community Choir, Ryder Cooley, The Return of Litha, Joe Boggess, Patrick Stansfield Jones, Mem Nahadr, and Doug Principato, the Staten Island singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who performs as grand pepper of reality and said he attended the very first LoveSphere 31 years ago.
“It changed my life,” Principato said.
He said the event introduced him to a collective of musicians, singers, filmmakers, and performers whose collaborations continued for decades, shaping bands, recordings, and friendships across projects and cities.
“It is indescribable because it takes the forms of the people that are involved,” Principato said.
That elasticity, he said, is part of what has always made Lovesphere distinctive. Some years it has looked like a play, some years a concert, some years something closer to a multi-sensory happening.
“What it means to me is literally love,” Principato said. “It’s the love for each other and respect and love of humanity first.”
Principato said performers are showing up not for a payday, but because they believe in the event and in the cause behind it. The safe-streets mission, he said, also resonates personally. He said his nephew recently witnessed a friend being killed by a drunk driver while the two were walking home from college, and recalled losing a close friend in a motorcycle crash when Principato was young.
“We’re doing this to do it and to get people’s awareness up also for the cause,” he said.
This year’s lineup brings together local and regional performers, including artists with long ties to Lovesphere’s earlier New York incarnations as well as newer Hudson Valley collaborators.
For Swonyoung, Lovesphere has become a way to make room for grief without letting grief have the final word.
“Lovesphere is a moment where we experience that as a community, where we experience music and art and theater and being together as people,” she said.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.