This event has been canceled.
Please note: This event has been postponed.
Faculty percussionist Bonnie Whiting presents Through the Eye(s), a cycle of pieces for solo speaking and singing percussionist developed in collaboration with nine incarcerated people at the Indiana Women's Prison. The program opens with Whiting's realization of faculty composer Melia Watras's graphic score, "Barking up which tree?"
Project Background
Through the Eye(s) is an extractable cycle of nine pieces for solo speaking and singing percussionist, developed in collaboration with nine incarcerated people at the Indiana Women's Prison, composer Eliza Brown, and percussionist Bonnie Whiting. Co-authors on the project include Whittney (CoCo) Bales-Malone, Ashley Strong, Marjorie Woods, Ingrid Swinford, Char’Dae Avery, LaDawn Johnson, Dawnetta Taylor (Shelton), Lara Campbell, Amaris Rose Bunyard, and Joyce (Potter) Hawkins.
The project centers the perspectives and artistic contributions of these incarcerated women, allowing education to function as “epistemic reparations” for the injustices incarcerated people experience. While this can manifest in many ways, in the realm of arts education, it means using the arts as a space for incarcerated students to develop hermeneutic frames for their experience – that is, to shape their own narratives – and providing platforms for the creative work of incarcerated people to enter the public sphere with full authorial attribution.
The program opens with Whiting's realization of Barking Up Which Tree? (2019), a graphic score by UW Viola Professor and composer Melia Watras, photographed by Michelle Smith-Lewis. Watras writes: "One block north of my house, the street is lined with plane trees. One sunny September day, I noticed lots of beautiful bark that had fallen from those trees into the street and onto the sidewalk. I was moved by the elegant and detailed shapes. The pieces lying next to each other made me think of a complex archipelago with secret markings revealed. In my fantasy, a plane tree had created an entire separate world inside itself, leaving us symbols that we could interpret through music. I drew on the bark, and in forming the symbols I looked to neume notation, specifically a Beneventan manuscript from the late 1000s to the early 1100s, manuscripts of the Bach Cello Suites, BWV 1007-1012, as well as other musical figures, sometimes interpreted through a whimsical lens."
PROGRAM DETAIL
The program opens with Bonnie Whiting's realization of faculty composer Melia Watras's graphic score, "Barking up which tree?" followed by Through the Eye(s).The music and texts of Through the Eye(s) were created by the participants in a semester-long course taught by composer Eliza Brown in Fall 2019 at Indiana Women's Prison. All of the texts respond in some way to the project's collectively determined theme, "calm and storm."
PROGRAM
Barking up which tree?
Graphic score by Melia Watras, photographed by Michelle Smith-Lewis
Through the Eye(s)
1. Calm and Storm (2’)
Text by Whittney (CoCo) Bales-Malone
Music by Eliza Brown
2. Nightly Storm (4’30”)
Music and text by Ashley Strong
3. Lost in the Fog (3’30”)
Text by Marjorie Woods
Music by Eliza Brown
4. My Tunnel (3-5’)
Graphic score and text by Ingrid Swinford
5. Violent Passion (2’15”)
Music and text by Char’Dae Avery
6. Fortitude (2’15”)
Music and text by LaDawn Johnson
7. Who’s That? (4’)
Improvisatory score and text by Dawnetta Taylor (Shelton)
8. HER (3’30”)
Music and lyrics by Lara Campbell
9. Emergence (1’)
Music and text by Amaris Rose Bunyard and Joyce (Potter) Hawkins
Through The Eye(s) Project Page