Eclipse



Program

Raven Chacon: American Ledger No. 1 (2018)
Naomi Rincón-Gallardo: Verses of Filth (2021)
Naomi Rincón-Gallardo: Sonnet of Vermin (2022)
Naomi Rincón-Gallardo: Eclipse (2023)
Raven Chacon: …lahgo adil’i dine doo yeehosinilgii yidaaghi (2004)

The works by Raven Chacon will be performed by (tba).

︎︎︎ Ku.Be, Performance [Dirch Passers Allé 4]
︎︎︎ 26.11.2024 20.00
︎︎︎ BUY FESTIVAL TICKET HERE

MINU 2024 has two kinds of tickets available.

150 kr - festival ticket that gives access to all events at the festival

200 kr - festival ticket + 1, that gives access to all events at the festival and allows you to bring a friend along [it can be different people for different events]

An eclipse heralds the end of another world, among multiple extinctions. When the moon devours the Sun it is feared that night will prevail forever and the Tzitzimimes will descend to Earth to eat up men.

We embark with an evening that chronicles American histories and mythologies. The event is book-ended by performances of two narrative, graphic scores by Raven Chacon, while Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s three short-films that comprise The Tzitzimime Trilogy serve as the centerpiece.

American Ledger No. 1 is a narrative score for performance, telling the creation story of the founding of the United States of America. In chronological descending order, moments of contact, enactment of laws, events of violence, the building of cities, and erasure of land and worldview are mediated through graphic notation, and realized by sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.

The Tzitzimime were female deities in Aztec mythology. As such, they were related to fertility and rainfall, yet feared for their ability to descend to Earth and devour men during solar eclipses, when it was feared that darkness would prevail forever. Powerful Mesoamerican deities play central roles in Rincón-Gallardo’s films, in which pre-Hispanic cosmology meets queer futurity in a bleak landscape of planetary cataclysm. Her films’ characters are born out of local and planetary ecological emergencies, current and historic injustice and patriarchal oppression, carrying no illusion of a “bright” future:

Adapted to the ruins

We don’t demand a future

We metabolize toxins

one more dose of cyanide!

…lahgo adil’i dine doo yeehosinilgii yidaaghi


(trans. Navajo. “acting strangely/differently in the company of strangers”)


Inspired some by Cardew’s Treatise, but more so of course by Navajo and Pueblo iconographies, particularly the ancient petroglyphs carved in the volcanic rock on the west side of Albuquerque. The piece however came about as a reaction to some listeners (or performers of my early works) believing that they should be hearing some kind of “Native American influence” in my music. Whatever that meant (to them). So this piece puts that burden into the hands of white performers, as that is who is the majority in music institutions in this country. There is no instruction or expectation for them to necessarily produce a particular style of music, (not in this piece, nor elsewhere either really), but I wanted to see if they would impose assumptions onto themselves, by being confronted with Indigenous symbols, a Navajo title, and knowing it was made by an Indigenous composer.