Dispatch
Candice Hopkins, Laura Ortman, Music Research Strategies, and Raven Chacon
In this second Open Exchange, musicians Laura Ortman and Music Research Strategies participate in Candice Hopkins’s and Raven Chacon’s Dispatch. They present an open dialogue of spoken elements, sound, and non-verbal language. Dispatch is either a transcription of events around the 2016 DAPL encroachment at Standing Rock, a prompt for an ecological oral future, or a critique of the privilege of meditative Deep Listening. The score can be realized as a performance, a series of imagined events, or as a response of direct action. The players, the prompts, and the schematics are derived from an analysis of the surface dynamics and organization of Water Protectors in defense of Standing Rock during the #noDAPL movement, not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices. In an increasingly fractured society, new paths and new formations are needed to refocus our attention in an attempt to find truth. Participating in this score may produce sonic or visual artifacts, these are as important as the actions.
Open exchange is curated by Juana Berrío. This is an in-person event. Free and open to the public.
Image: Fragment of Dispatch score by Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon.
Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer and citizen of Tagish/Carcross First Nation. She is executive director of Forge Project NY.
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a musician, composer and collaborative artist based in Brooklyn, New York since 1997.
Raven Chacon is a composer, musician and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation.
Music Research Strategies is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, and composer. He is based in Oakland, CA.
Open Exchange offers a platform for audience members and special guests to sit together in an open, non-hierarchical way and create a space for narratives and knowledge that are collectively formed and shared via storytelling, music listening parties, Indigenous talking circles, and spiritual teaching and healing sessions, among other forms.
Open Exchange is created by Juana Berrío.
