CHANT DOWN

“Chant Down”the performance series that accompanies the installation “The Voice Does Go Up” investigates the forces and rebellious energies that inhabit traditional Caribbean songs and explores the anticolonial legacies that gave shape to ancestral percussive and chanting techniques. This performative exploration revisits the modes these legacies are reactivated through repetitive rhythmic and harmonic structures. Awakened by collective chanting, the performance seeks to access the vibrational registers—sometimes secret and hidden—in which the history of Black and Indigenous struggle found refuge. Spectators are invited into a performative listening session that make manifest the existence of highly complex musical and sonic structures in which anticolonial legacies have been codified and passed down to us.This series has been developed in collaboration with Carolina Oliveros, an influential Colombian singer, composer, and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. In “Chant Down” Carolina leads an experimental vocal and percussive ensemble that weaves multiple Caribbean and Latin American musical traditions that find a connective tissue, a rhythmic one, that brings together sonic traditions that have played a central role in the political history of the Americas. Chant Down seeks to rescue some of these sonic practices and recover them for a contemporary understanding of their value, relevance, and, above all, their political potential; in other words, their capacity to mobilize collective assemblies. The installation and the performance series, in harmonic conjunction, transport visitors into a realm where music, spirituality, and the human body converge.

Perfomance direction by Luis Rincón Alba

Musical direction by Carolina Oliveros

Visual direction by Camila Falquez

Lead Voice
Carolina Oliveros

Performers
Natalia Perez
Gina Soto
Mobéy Lola Irizarry
Luis Rincón Alba

Light Design
Fran Rios

Costume Design
Delia Alleyne

Production Assistant Nandi Dion