Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS
Bio & Statement
CV
Exhibitions & Projects
2026
2025
2024
2023
return to home
Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS
Bio & Statement
CV
Exhibitions & Projects
2026
2025
2024
2023
return to home
collaborative sound, movement, and visual performance at Gray Area, San Francisco, CA
October 26th, 2024
1 hr 54 min
commissioned by Soundwave: Next
Re-Education: An Evening of Togetherness was the fifth iteration of the Togetherness Ensemble, convened by Zekarias Musele Thompson to hold space for communal resonance through collective improvisation. Twenty-one performers gathered at Gray Area in San Francisco on October 26, 2024 to perform RE-EDUCATION, an emergent composition in three movements: A Curiosity, A Recognition, A Promise. The work drew on the ecstatic meditations of Alice Coltrane's Lord of Lords (1972) and Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders' Promises (2021), responding to the current moment as a question of what one evening of people emphasizing sound as motion might do in relation to the long histories of conquest, control, and necropolitical pressure now playing out through the devices in everyone's pockets. The Togetherness Ensemble approaches music as one of humanity's earliest technologies for communing, relating, and influencing the individual and collective nervous system in real time.
project description from program notes:
The Togetherness Ensemble is convened on occasion by Zekarias Musele Thompson to hold space for communal resonance through collective improvisation. Prompted by the historical and contemporary creative sensibilities of African and African diasporic peoples, and the possibilities of emergent composition as the scaffolding for recognizing ourselves as free.
The Togetherness Ensemble made its debut interpreting James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during closing performance of Possible Dialogues: Vol 1 in July 2023 at the BAMPFA.
For this fifth iteration we will explore Togetherness in three parts with a new composition titled RE-EDUCATION. Inspired by the current moment, the ecstatic motions of Alice Coltrane’s 1972 epic “Lord of Lords,” as well as Floating Points' and Pharoah Sanders' 2021 collaboration, “Promises.”
RE-EDUCATION
Movement 1: A Curiosity
Movement 2: A Recognition
Movement 3: A Promise
with:
Salimatu Amabebe, Matt Brownell, Gabriele Christian, Roco Córdova, B Dukes, Mary Graham, Christopher Robin Duncan, Cat Lauigan, Phillip Laurent, Amina Malika, Micah Morris, Maya Nixon, Jasmine Nyende, Martin Perna, Justin (Hongry) Robinson, Benjamin Rodgers, Joel St. Julien, Zekarias Musele Thompson, David Wilson, Josh Wismans, and Gaia WXYZ.
“In the year that so many of us know as 2024 we find ourselves witnessing, from various degrees of intimacy and distance, the last gasp of the dominant hegemonic paradigm of the past few thousand years (give or take a few) playing out the extent of its necropolitical underpinnings in real time. To borrow from Achille Mbembe in thinking about the extent of bodily control, and technocratic pilfering that we encounter on a quotidian foundation. That is to say, the contemporary manifestation of a long-standing and cross cultural practice of conquest and its inherent violences are being played on, in and through the devices that we carry around in our pockets, now quite literally exploding in our faces.
So what are we to do? And what is the capacity for one evening of people emphasizing sound as motion to interact with the thousands of years of complexity that bring us to the aforementioned predicament, one may ask?
Two important questions; to which I respond that first, I do not ‘know’ the answer.
What I do know is that what we call music is one of the earliest technologies that humans have in fostering conditions of communing, relating, and influencing the individual and collective nervous system in real time. I also know that the creation and the perception of music is constantly being built by all the bodies receiving and responding to its motions. Both the primary makers of the sounds, and those that might perceive themselves as only listening. And I know that what we now call music is first a practice of ritual, “a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests,” as defined by the late British cultural anthropologist Victor W Turner. Let’s replace the word preternatural with the phrase, beyond our everyday perception here and move forward.
As humans, our bodies are very used to responding to the unknown by creating predictive patterns in which to build meaning upon. Leading us to our current predicament, and back to your second question about what can one evening of musical performance do. Emergent composition, often times thought of as improvisation, utilizes our capacity to exist within and without the need to adhere to what came before. Creating embodied possibility to accept all that is, and to shape it towards our individual and collective desires. All this is done through the impulse to just, play.
I believe we are being asked to utilize all the complexity of the world that has been created to find new ways of being, and to create a world where all humans have the possibility and conditions to thrive. In order to do so we take the opportunity to reeducate our minds and bodies toward new possibilities.
Togetherness is a return to practice, to work out the kinks, and to find our way through.”
~Zekarias Musele Thompson