With Sara Lucas and Luis Sotelo
Dr. Luis Sotelo Castro and PhD candidate Sara Lucas from the Acts of Listening Lab and The Listening Choir will discuss how musical interventions, particularly community choral music, can catalyze dialogue in communities that have experienced collective trauma. We will explore how this form of participatory art, whether used in reperformances of oral histories or ancient plays, can be used as a tool for performing listening in a restorative justice context. Speaking to their experiences producing “Llamado y Respuesta: Quien a escuchar a Cesar Lasso?,” Dr. Sotelo Castro will highlight how he used community collaboration to support further audience participation within these dialogic spaces.
“Llamado y Respuesta: Quien a escuchar a Cesar Lasso?” uses headphones verbatim (a documentary theatre technique) and choral singing to reconstruct moments of a hearing of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace set up in 2016 in Colombia as a war crimes tribunal to enable victims of war crimes to be heard and ex-rebels and other offenders to admit responsibility and contribute to repairing the damages caused. It focuses on the statements by Cesar Lasso, a police officer who was held hostage for thirteen years, five months and one day by the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).”
Sara Lucas is a St. Louis raised, Montreal-based, vocalist, guitarist, composer and educator and a PhD student in the Individualized Program in Fine Arts at Concordia University. With her groups LADAMA and Callers she has co-written and co-produced five albums of original music and toured internationally as an independent artist. She designs culturally-relevant music curriculum that is currently in use in K-5 classrooms in the United States. Her work experiments with time, language, and form and is dedicated to accessing humanity regardless of genre. As a collaborator, she uses music as an intercultural exploration of communication, to create original works as part of community music making, and is invested in the activation of participant-led experiences.
Luis C. Sotelo Castro is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal (Quebec, Canada). In 2018 he founded at Concordia the Acts of Listening Lab, a hub for research-creation on the transformative power of listening to painful narratives, with particular reference to testimonies by exiles from sites of conflict. His latest publications explore listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. For instance, see ‘Facilitating voicing and listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. The Colombian scenario.’ In: De Nardi, S., Orange, H., et al. Routledge Handbook of Memoryscapes. Routledge: London. (2019), and his article ‘Not being able to speak is torture: performing listening to painful narratives’. International Journal of Transitional Justice, Special Issue Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice: Contributions of Arts and Culture.
REGISTRATION
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but you need to register!
This is a virtual event. A zoom link will be generated in the coming days for online registration. For any questions contact, cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
