CONCERT:
Sounding Sovereignties
May 27, 8pm
***Note new date!***
FREE
Guest Indigenous performers who engage in the practice of sound and sovereignty share their work in an evening of performance. Performers include Cheryl L’Hirondelle, White Mountain Apache violinist and composer Laura Ortman, Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon, Wolastoq composer and vocal artist Jeremy Dutcher and media artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett from Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations.
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GATHERING:
Doing Sovereignties
May 2016
Doing Sovereignties is a gathering of artists, activists, scholars and curators focused on every day actions of Sovereignty, particularly sound, speech and song. The gathering will both focus on models of Indigenous sovereignty and sound practice. The aim of these conversations is to explore the range of Indigenous perspectives on sovereignty that do not begin from Western theoretical perspectives but instead begin with what Indigenous peoples are already “doing” as sovereignty, as well as enacting sovereignty in public spaces.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES – Sounding Sovereignties Concert
Raven Chacon is an American composer and installation artist working in a variety of mediums. He is known as a composer of chamber music as well as a solo performer of experimental noise music. He is recognized as one of few Native Americans working in either genre.
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn composer, musician, visual artist, and hairstylist. Currently, she has completed her third solo album My Soul Remainer recorded by legendary Brooklyn engineer Martin Bisi, playing violin, Apache violin, electric guitar, amplified piano, Casio, pedal steel guitar, vocals, samples and field recordings. She continually collaborates with artists, filmmakers, dancers and musicians from New York, New Mexico, Italy and Canada, including Jock Soto, Nanobah Becker, Raven Chacon, Martha Colburn, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Okkyung Lee, Alan Michelson, Nina Sobell, Brooke Swaney and Pegi Vail. She has performed, recorded and toured with New York bands Stars Like Fleas and The Dust Dive, amongst many others. In 2014 she was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency for music in Captiva, Florida. In 2015 she was awarded a residency at IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts for music in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble performing and improvising to the 1914 original score to photographer Edward Curtis’s only film “In the Land of the Head Hunters” to sold-out audiences at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. http://thedustdiveflash.bandcamp.com/
Jeremy Dutcher is an emerging Toronto-based composer and vocal artist. This classically trained operatic tenor takes every opportunity to blend his Wolastoq First Nation roots into the music he creates. Jeremy is currently working on his debut release ‘Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa’ (Maliseet Songs) slated for release Fall 2016.
Bracken Hanuse Corlett is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He began working in the theatre and performance 16 years ago, before transitioning towards a practice that fuses digital-media, audio-visual performance, writing, painting, sculpture and drawing. His work combines traditional Indigenous iconography and history with new media and concepts that exist within cyclical time. He is the co-founder of the Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival and over the last five years he has performed across the country, previously as a member of the audio-visual collective Skookum Sound System and currently in the DJ/VJ duo See Monsters. He is a graduate of the En’owkin Centre of Indigenous Art and went to Emily Carr University of Art and Design for a B.F.A. in Visual Arts. He has also studied Northwest Coast art, carving and design from acclaimed Heiltsuk artists Bradley Hunt and his sons Shawn Hunt and Dean Hunt. Some of his notable exhibitions, performances and screenings have been at Grunt Gallery, Museum of Anthropology, Unit PITT Projects, Vancouver International Film Festival (Vancouver), Three Walls Gallery (Chicago), Ottawa International Animation Festival, SAW Gallery (Ottawa), Royal BC Museum, Open Space (Victoria), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective, Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina), Atlantic Film Festival, Tidal Force – Independent Media Arts Alliance (Halifax), Art Mur, Sommets du Cinéma D’animation (Montreal), ImagineNative, Toronto International Film Festival, Music Gallery (Toronto).
Known for her ability to freely move between loudly singing and drumming out a traditional drum song at a community event to crooning a contemporary ballad in an intimate concert setting, Cheryl L’Hirondelle attributes this to a combination of a strong musical upbringing, musical training and years spent either listening and participating in First Nations ceremonial music or alternative bands. Cheryl’s Debut 5 song EP “Giveaway” was reviewed and added to the 2nd edition of musicologist Brian Wright Mcleod’s Encyclopedia of Native Music. The EP is a sample from the Vancouver version of her sonic-mapping songwriting project Songlines with the songs inspired from various sights, sounds and movement as she walked around Vancouver during the winter of 2008. A full album is scheduled for completion in 2012 that will include songs from two further renditions: Toronto songlines, where in 2010/2011 she re-traced old indigenous trails and hunting, gathering and ceremonial locations around current day Toronto and an upcoming Adelaide songlines where she will have the honour of listening to the land and spending time with the Kaurna people as she walks around Adelaide, Australia. L’Hirondelle’s previous musical efforts have also garnered her critical acclaim with two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards 2006 and 2007 for her contributions to Vancouver based Aboriginal Women’s Ensemble M’Girl. Her own first attempt in producing (and as one half of) the singing/songwriting duo Nikamok was recognized with a nomination from the Prairie Music Awards (now the Western Canadian Music Awards) and many of her songs have been licenced for television, documentary and feature films. Ever the visionary, she continues to come up with new ways her music and other artistic ideas can converge and in 2009 was recognized as an Honoree in the Net.Art category from the 13th Annual Webby Awards for vancouversonglines.ca, one that she hopes to be the first of many more online music projects. Her latest music video is called NDNSPAM Song (go to the music page to watch it), which she co-directed with her music producer Gregory Hoskins. Cheryl is also working on a collection of songs she is co-writing with women in prisons and correctional centres across this land now known as Canada.
