Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING COMPOSER RAVEN CHACON EXPLORES HOW THE FUSION OF SOUND, SPACE, AND COMMUNITY CREATES MUSICAL EXPERIENCES THAT IGNITE MEANINGFUL DISCUSSIONS.

THE PETER LONDON GLOBAL DANCE COMPANY CREATES A SPACE WHERE DANCERS EXPLORE THEIR SPIRITUAL AWARENESS, DEVELOP UNIQUE VOICES, AND PERFORM POWERFUL, COMMUNITY- CENTERED WORKS.

MUSIC IS FREEDOM They say these be ruins... >>Faith Perez: What inspires your compositions?

>>Raven Chacon: Yeah, different things.

You know, um, most of the time it's people.

It's people that I'm working with or collaborating with.

Other musicians and instruments that they play.

>>Raven Chacon: And also, I make my own instruments.

And so, I make music for those as well, these kind of noise instruments.

And I really like to do that because those instruments have no history, so there's no wrong way to play them.

And so, those become lifelong projects of just figuring out how they work.

How to make new sound with these.

[Music] >>Raven Chacon: There's also inspiration in the places I end up doing these projects.

So, if I get invited to a city to do something, to collaborate with people to make a new work, I usually research the history of that place.

And um, you know, spend most of the time in the beginning to just understand where it is I am, and who lives there, who has lived there, and what changes have happened in that place over time.

Even pre-human time.

And all of this goes into an artwork or a music composition, and ends up as, um, maybe being the story that's being told through the music, if that's even possible.

[Music] >>Faith Perez: Yeah.

I was going to ask you how the history of the locations that you compose for shape the compositions that you're doing.

Like, Voiceless Mass?

>>Raven Chacon: Yeah.

That started as an invitation to write a piece for, uh, a church organ in this cathedral in Milwaukee.

And so, I wanted to use that opportunity to talk about the church.

And not just that particular church in Milwaukee.

But, given that maybe this composition would be performed multiple times in different places, and it required this organ as part of its ensemble, that this would be an opportunity for this discussion to travel every time it was performed.

And so, Voiceless Mass is written in a way where it references the choral music of the Church, except that there's no, there's no singers in this piece.

It's just the organ, you know, being accompanied by other instruments.

And this being a kind of maybe metaphor for an inaccessibility of voices to be heard throughout the history of the Church.

And also, this history of colonization that the Church has contributed to.

And for indigenous people, that led to a loss of language.

[Music] >>Raven Chacon: For me, I can, I want to write things that I like to listen to.

And so, I can only start from that point, of wanting to make music that I want to listen to.

>>Faith Perez: What is the kind of music that you want to make to, that you want to listen to?

>>Raven Chacon: Well, those are those fleeting moments.

You know, those are the things that cannot be captured.

And I think that's why I like sound and music so much.

Because it can't be fixed.

A lot of my work is improvisation, meaning that it's going to change every time.

It's, you know, you might have only heard that sound once, or that gesture.

And, you'll never hear it again.

[Music] >>Faith Perez: How do you come up with like, the ideas for graphic scores, especially for like American Ledger Number Two?

I thought that one looked really interesting.

>>Raven Chacon: They all come from different places.

Uh, the American Ledger series, they're all based around flags.

So, American Ledger One is based on the US flag.

It's abstracted, all of its symbols inside of it, the stars the stripes.

You know, the whole kind of layout of how that looks.

But it's rearranged in a way so that it tells a chronology of the country.

Of the land that we live on.

And so, just taking that as a starting point and redrawing all of these elements, but combining them into other kinds of, uh, symbols, both musical and non-musical, are ways to tell that story.

So, for instance, in that in that piece there's the letters "DC", which in music notation might mean "DC al coda."

Like, you know, go back to the beginning and play it again until you get to the coda.

But, of course, DC is the District of Columbia.

You know, it's the, it's the Capital.

So, inside of this, the more you're looking, you see the references to colonization from Europe.

You see, uh, when slavery was enacted.

You see the laws, uh, and the inequity of those laws inside of the score.

>>Faith Perez: And that's reflected in all three of them, right?

>>Raven Chacon: All three.

Yeah.

There's three of these.

So far, number two is written for Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And so that, that's a piece that also looks like the state flag, but also references the forced migrations of tribes into Oklahoma, which then forced some native peoples out of Oklahoma.

And also referencing the Black community that ended up living in Tulsa, but then was also driven out by race riots.

It's this kind of cycle.

I mean the system of the score itself replicates this, this movement, this cycle of in and out, and requires its participants to share instruments.

But this sharing of instruments, um, you know, that causes a competition for resources.

So, it becomes this crabs-in-a-bucket system, that um, just tells of the inequity, inequities of the systems that, uh, were in place in the early 20th century.

[Music] >>Faith Perez: I was also, I really liked how the community, right, was involved in that too.

And individuals coming together to do that.

I noticed that's a big part of your work.

Why is that so important, to include community members?

>>Raven Chacon: Well, music needs other people to play it, you know?

I can't play all those instruments myself.

You know, I can I understand how they work, but there's people who've studied these instruments for their whole lives.

And um, I love collaborating with them.

I love hearing again new sounds, new ways of playing them.

Maybe one of the benefits of being a musician is you get to travel to all these places and meet new people.

And so, a composition is an opportunity to gather and to discuss a score.

You know, a composition.

And to me that's the fun part, to rehearse, to put myself self aside as being the composer of this, and just being another participant or listener.

And leaving it up to them to do the rest, and putting it in their hands.

And um, it's exciting.

Again, because it makes the music different every time.

And so, I really value when there's different interpretations of these pieces.

And it makes it a brand-new work every time.

[Sounds of foghorns] >>Faith Perez: Can you uh, describe your process when you're composing for unconventional instruments, like um, foghorns, or like firearms?

...one, two, three, four... [Sounds of gunshots] >>Raven Chacon: There's a few ways that I might go about it.

I mean, I'm really considering the ensemble, or the musicians that I've roped into this thing.

Can they read music notation?

And a lot of people know that language of that notation, but it's not the only way to make music.

You know, most musicians in the world don't read western music notation.

But if they do, I'll just write it out in regular notations.

So, the piece for guns, it's all scored out.

You know, there's quarter notes.

There's um, well there's no accent marks, because the gun's just going to be loud.

There's no pitch, but there's rhythms that are notated.

[Sounds of gunshots] >>Raven Chacon: But the foghorns, you know, I was not expecting that uh, every person who's working on one of these ships is going to be able to read music.

But also, they need to be synced in a way, um, conducted and timed so that they could play together.

And so, that one's written differently.

It's written as a kind of a stopwatch queue.

[Sounds of foghorns] >>Raven Chacon: I mean, it's very much about logistics.

But it's also, I think my reason for using graphic notation is to make it more accessible.

They're not, uh, meant to be mysterious, or esoteric uh, symbols.

They're meant to solve a problem of coordination and um, considering the different ways of thinking about time throughout a duration of a composition.

[Music] >>Raven Chacon: In this opportunity to go and make music in different places, and in this understanding of new places that, I, you know, that aren't my home, you start to, you start to understand and think about the ways that all of us people try to steward these places that we call home.

And so, for myself as a guest, as a visitor, part of my work is always to try to get insight into the current conditions of these places.

You know, if that's some kind of industry that's encroached upon a place.

If it's been uh, you know, perhaps people are having to move out because of the economic factors of what's happening in their home.

Uh, it becomes something that I try to understand and maybe, uh, relate back to my own home.

Music is a very difficult medium to relay some of these ideas, especially if it's just instrumental music.

You know, how do we do that?

And so, there's, in some of these works there's been extra kind of musical ideas that, or performance tactics to tell these stories.

You know, there might be a narrator, there might be elements of theater, there might be, uh, a soundwork that ends up as a video installation to further tell this history.

And, it goes back to this idea that uh, music shouldn't have to be confined to just music venues.

You know, the concert hall, or even um, you know, even a warehouse space.

I mean, music can be made anywhere.

It can be made outdoors.

It can be made at um, places where people are not expecting to encounter a discussion, you know?

And whatever that discussion ends up being prompted by this music, I think it gets people to stop and at least listen, and if nothing else consider what it is we're trying to say.

[Music] SPIRITUAL HEALING Having my own dance company.

I get to number one work with the dancers to develop their own voice and their spiritual development.

It's not a religion because there's no religion attached to it, but for them to have a safe space to explore their own spiritual awareness and consciousness and give them that space.

And that's what the PLGDC is, giving them that space to do that and to find that.

So there's no interference at all with them.

They come in.

They have this space they work, and they do.

And I guide them through that.

And so on and so on, and I don't have to do a lot of guiding because the people that I bring or join it, they already have a sense of what that is.

Right.

Left, right, left and left and one.

I started with him in 2019 at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center.

He was looking for a group of young men to dance in his Black Men Stories, and I'm now a company member as of last year, December.

He is very spiritual, and he loves on every one of his company members, which is a big reason why I was so ecstatic to join the company, and also because I'm in school too.

So, he was really lenient with me in between school and here because I go to school in Michigan.

I'm a sophomore BFA musical theater major, and he's been really lenient enough and really nice enough to have me here, company member and also in school.

So, he's just such a kind heart.

He was actually my teacher at New World School of the Arts.

So, I've been, I worked with him for four years.

And then after I graduated, he called me to be the part of the company.

So, I'm just very grateful for that.

And, I feel like working with him in school definitely helped.

Move, move, move back.

And move.

[Laughter] Peter London is like; you never know what to expect.

It just keeps you on your toes.

And it's very challenging.

And it keeps you, keeps you moving forward.

Position three, position four, and sweep, and sweep and the hand goes this way.

Ready 5, 6, 7, 8.

When he gives notes, he always gives you a backstory to why you're doing what you're doing.

It's not just steps like there's a story behind every movement that you do.

This dance is, Children of the Underground, the idea, the concept is a lot of the secular dance originated with, with the, sacred dances.

So, you can see movement that might be done in a Orisha feast in, in the carnival dance and the calypso and so on and so forth.

And then we take that like, in New York.

I know the, you know, the carnival dances in Trinidad, but like in New York, I would go out and you go to like, some fancy bar.

And in there, the -- wherever they came from - - the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, new Jersey, some as far as Philadelphia.

Saturday night it would be a party scene and people would dance in like a Congo Square and folks would dance.

You saw some of the most incredible dancing, and it's all improv, but you see it.

You see the origin is African, you know.

Some of them don't even actually know that.

It's just in their DNA and the rhythm and the music and it just comes out, you know.

But I could identify, you know, this is from the Congo.

Maybe this is from here.

This is from there because these are the dances we do in Trinidad.

But the kids would tear it up in the clubs.

And so the idea is that from the sacred to the secular and from the secular back to the sacred.

And that's what this dance is about.

The space is created for them to explore and do that and bring that to the high level, because what we are doing is sharing light with our community.

And that light could be inspiring, and it could be healing as it's inspiring for us and healing for us.

And so, it's community work, you know, spiritual community work.

And attached is entertaining.

It's, it's there's a level of entertainment.

We go into the theater and we put on costumes and makeup and there's music and we entertain you.

But that's not the core of what it is we're doing.

What we're doing is spiritual healing.

Divine energies from the multiverse that's flooding through us, move through us and hit you like a vibrational storm and shake you up.

Just is the same experience that I had when the dancers were possessed in the Yoruba temple in Trinidad, right?

What happened?

And you see people getting possessed and tumbling and falling and that drumming and that chanting.

And that sound, that vibration, come from that voice straight into your heart and you start to quiver and vibrate from that.

It's all vibration and energy coming at you.

And so that is what my company is about, that divine vibration that's coming from the multiverse, coming through this orb and then back into the people there, and then they give it back, even if they're not aware, then they give it back to us, not just with the applaud, but it bounces back to us.

So we have a communication.

We're communicating with each other on a spiritual level, whether they are aware of it or not.

That's happening.

And then remember, the energy is vibrations is not static.

Everything is moving at rates of speed that we cannot even contemplate.

The rate of speed, everything that's to move, everything and nothing is solid.

Nothing at all is solid, and everything is music.

Music.

Palm trees in the wind.

Miami storm.

We're in Miami, we just.

We went through this storm with all the palm trees movin'.

You have no excuse just move that body like the palm trees swaying in that wind in that storm.

Five, six, seven and.

Okay.

Hold on.

So, this elbow actually have to go down to the floor on a diagonal.

That's where it's going.

That's the direction.

Yes.

Down to that floor on a diagonal.

Ready?

Down.

Diagonally down.

Keep your torso down.

What is this?

This is an elevé.

Go up on elevé.

Can I see that, please?

And up.

Up and get your hands out there.

This is lightning, like a lightning strike and the sound of -- And then the foot is the thunder.

When you come down, it's that thunder.

Boom, boom.

Okay, can you back up a little bit?

So, you're not like directly in front of her.

Okay.

Take him up.

Take him up.

There you go.

Okay, okay.

This this needs this.

This needs to sweep the floor to come across.

Now sweep it.

That's right.

Okay, go get him.

Go get him!

Go get him!

I said what I said, okay.

Walk on by.

Don't just be looking at in the front and doing the steps.

Relate to her throughout the duet.

Look at her.

Look at.

Look at her when you come around.

Okay?

He is, first and foremost a teacher.

He, is a professor of dance at the New World School of the Arts.

And I've seen him work with, really young ones and dance all the way up to high school and college.

He is full of enthusiasm about everything he does.

He loves his dancers.

And you can tell because they're very loyal to him.

And they come back often for repeat performances.

Peter is top of the top.

We have enjoyed his dance for quite a long time.

It's just so energetic, particularly with his Caribbean dance and so creative.

And he's incorporated a lot of, you know, the African Caribbean roots.

And I am from Saint Lucia, so I am kin to that.

And it brings me back as well as he shares the wealth of knowledge of the Caribbean culture, which everybody else who attends the performance.

Those of you who, watch us and try to help get the word out.

To celebrate what all these, wonderful young people are doing.

Not just in my company, but all the companies and schools and so on and so forth.

In this community in Miami and the communities around the country, the United States, and all the people in the background who never get seen or the teachers, you know, the parents, the godmothers and so on and so forth.

You know, the people who dip their hand in a pocket to buy slippers and tights, all those people.

And so basically, I'm just a thread in the carpet, you know, just a tiny little thread.

That's it.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.