The Society for Ethnomusicology brought scholars from around the country to New Mexico for its yearly conference. As part of a free, daylong symposium designed to launch the days of discussion, longtime experimentalists from femme-forward music festival Gatas y Vatas brought their work to the academics. Fest founder Marisa Demarco brings us a story about decolonizing performance, panels, hotel ballrooms …
Late fall, 2018. A hotel ballroom. Rows of chairs. Tablecloths on the long tables. A stage. A projector. The big room full of scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists—maybe a couple hundred people there. Four organizers with Gatas y Vatas, a homegrown Albuquerque music fest and practitioners of experimental performance, are invited in.
My sister, a composer, performer and athlete, Monica Demarco: “Our intention was to go into the space to talk about decolonizing music. But it’s a very colonial idea to host a panel, because of the power dynamics involved in what a panel is like. So our job was to go in and decolonize the panel itself.”
We took position in the four corners of the room, surrounding the researchers.
Autumn Chacon, an artist and performer: “We wanted to sort of break that structure and re-structure it into something that isn’t necessarily focused with a confrontation of people at the front of the room and people facing them, but people all around the room. Circles are very important when learning because it creates a horizontal framework rather than perpetuating a hierarchy of those who have knowledge and those who don’t.”
To begin our 90-minutes in the ballroom, Autumn cuts up a purple potato on a wooden cutting board with a miced knife running through a guitar amplifier.
“So I did a sort of short iteration of a piece that I perform a lot known as noise cooking,” Autumn says. “Chopping a vegetable, and that vegetable is going through a transformation of live organism into something that we eat, maybe the audience is able to empathize with that thing. So it’s intentional to use indigenous food items and not meat because that might be a little too intense to really think about what’s happening to that meat as we’re cutting it and consuming it. But a vegetable is enough, especially a vegetable that comes from the land, and thinking about the life of that organism before it becomes our food.”
“Somebody had a question about it as violence, right, because of the knife?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Autumn says. “To me it’s very interesting that somebody thought of that, the use of a knife, of preparing this potato, this purple potato, as being aggressive or violent, rather than an act of survival. It does sort of give me an idea of the privilege and the backgrounds of where some of our audience members are coming from, where to some people knives are aggressive, to others it’s a simple tool.”
Across the big space, Autumn crossfades with Antonia Montoya, who is playing through her own speaker, forcing the audience to turn, to follow the sound spatially to what was now behind them. In the distance, the stage, looms, vacant.
Antonia reflects, later, by phone. “Well, my solo piece was a condensed version of a piece I had performed at Gatas y Vatas, and it was very personal,” she says. “The concept of Gatas the last time was about, you know, protest. And so my protest was around silence surrounding sexual assault. I took it in a really personal nature.
I was really directly talking about my experience being sexually assaulted in the music community, and it was really hard to be that vulnerable and to be that open about something I don’t tell but like the closest people to me. And so even when I performed it at Gatas it was really hard, even though Gatas is what I would consider the most receptive, welcoming, supportive, you know like, comfortable community space for me to perform in. It was still really challenging then.
And so to do this piece at a conference with a bunch of people that I didn’t know, and in a strange environment for music performance—being a conference, hotel conference, banquet type room. It was very vulnerable and it was scary. I was pretty terrified going into it. Not because of just performance in general, but specifically about being that personal and vulnerable in a situation like that.
And it’s the type of performance—for people that weren’t there—it’s the type of performance that’s not like ‘read between the lines.’ It was very very obvious what I was talking about.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s super direct.”
When Antonia first performed the piece at Gatas in 2017, it was about 48 hours or so before the #MeToo movement swept the country, and then the globe. She named her assailant during her set. The room had a real sense of connectivity in that moment, as people watched Antonia confront and make visible what had happened, in some cases, also reflecting on their own, long silence. A fully realized work, Antonia’s performance also gifted her audience the words to create something better.
“What I said beforehand was that I want to guide us in one way that we can kind of heal our spaces and make them more welcoming for people who are surviving sexual assault,” Antonia says. “So I led in with that, and then asked everyone to repeat after me. And I said, ‘I see you. I believe you. What can I do to help you feel safe here?’ ”
The ethnomusicology symposium is a different scene.
“And what is it like to do that with those people in that room?,” I ask. “Was it different than when you had done it before?”
“Completely,” Antonia says. “When I did it before, I guess I had a different view of what I was doing when I did that. I was wanting to build community. With this one, I felt so, I guess for lack of a better phrase, it didn’t feel like a safe space for me personally to be sharing what I just shared. And so when I had them repeat after me, I was having them talk to me. I had just shared something really personal about being sexually assaulted, and then I had them all in the audience tell me, ‘I see you. I believe you. What can I do to help you feel safe here?’ ”
I try to explore the difference. “I don’t know,” I say. “At Gatas, I felt like you were giving us some really direct language to use for something that we might want to be expressing already. And at the symposium, I felt like you were demanding that audience, demanding something from them, which is different, right?”
“For sure,” she says. “Yeah. And they didn’t all participate as much as they did at Gatas y Vatas either. So that was interesting as well.”
At the symposium, we work to decentralize the stage, and to show that we can create stage spaces anywhere, as has long been our practice. But as Antonia performs, I watch one or two of the visiting academics behave very oddly around her, encroaching on her space in a strange way, not reading the moment the way everyone else seems to be intuiting.
Maybe it is pushback against our tactics, a refusal to participate in the dismantling of some of these embedded, unspoken, control mechanisms.
Lately, my work has centered on my heartbeat. I use a medical tool—an electronic stethoscope—to hear into my chest, to hear my heart and lungs, to hear my voice ring in my chest cavity. It’s a vulnerable set for me, exposed, letting a room hear inside by body. And it makes me nervous to perform it even in friendly situations. Potentially contentious situations like this one—which had already yielded some tense back-and-forth—put me really on edge before I let people hear my heart.
It’s like giving away a secret.
I derive strength from the exchange though, from amplifying these sounds of my machinery, the pump-and-valve system that keeps me upright. And also from imposing the truth of myself, of my body, and maybe also the truth of everyone’s body, onto uncomfortable spaces and imperialist, rule-bound, hierarchical, heady social situations.
“It’s definitely interesting to walk into a space where you know the audience has a certain expectation, and your goal is to circumvent and sort of press against that expectation, and be ready for pushback,” Monica says. “I like to play to audience that are going to enjoy what I’m doing, and it’s a very different environment to be in a space where some people are maybe angry or not excited about what you’re doing, or think that because what you’re doing there must be some sort of mistake going on.
So walking into that kind of environment can be intimidating a little bit but it’s necessary. So I think there’s got to be a good balance between—you know, I guess the saying is singing to the choir—where you are in a space where everybody is excited to be there and it’s like a community space and everybody’s working together, and then also to be in spaces where people are maybe going to reject what you’re doing and still, you know, do them both. Balance both kinds of audiences.”
“What did you think it was like?” I ask. “Did you feel like it was a contentious space, and how do you think it was received?”
“I think it was probably a situation where a lot of people were on board with us, but those people tend to be less vocal,” Monica says. “I think when somebody is enjoying watching a subversive act, they’re more like just spectating and enjoying it. And when somebody feels threatened, that person is more likely to be the person that stands up and starts to argue with you. So I bet you there were only a few people in the audience that were really feeling upset. And we heard from all of them. And probably the vast majority of the audience was enjoying it, but they’re not as vocal about that.”
“How did it change the way you approached the show?”
“Knowing that there was going to be people there that were upset?” Monica asks. “I think you just go in and you are who you are. I think it’s important not to compromise your own values. I mean, even though you know you’re walking into a contentious space, just to commit and double-down on what you think is the right thing to do. Because, you know, that’s why they invited us there, was to be who we are. And they invited Gatas knowing what Gatas is.
The people that I was there trying to uphold the values of, and really be there for, are our fellow Gatas. So I was thinking about that. And that means not compromising who you are, and being honest about your experience, even in environments where people are not going to want you to be honest.”
At the symposium, Monica was the fourth corner of the room, performing a piece about a dry river, using photos she commissioned our own troubled Rio Grande, which has struggled hard these last years, in some regions drying up completely for miles. Monica based her piece on “Dunt,” a poem by Alice Oswald.
“If you look at the text of the poem, the water nymph, who’s the last of her kind, the last known speaker of her language, is trying to bring the water back to the riverbed,” Monica says. “And it’s about her struggle, being alone and trying to bring it back herself, and shouldering that responsibility but this desire to bring back a river. Throughout the poem, she gets put in a little glass case, put in a museum, as a relic, and she’s still inside of that glass case, trying to summon back the water, and throughout the poem, her intention remains the same: To bring back the water and to summon back the water.
I feel like performing a piece like that, where I’m committing to my core values, in a space where I’m in a little glass box, feels the same to me.”
After Monica’s set, all four performers make their way to the hotel’s intended stage and get behind the table appropriately.
But I hijacked the hotel’s sound system in the ceiling, and the mics are wired through another chain of music-making tools. Autumn brings her cutting board, potato and knife to the stage, too. Professor Ana Alonso Minutti begins asking questions. And we answer, while the potato continues to be prepared for eating, producing an encroaching sound that’s now floating through the speakers in the hotel’s ceiling.
“So how do artists who work abstractly, address specific social problems?” Ana asks.
Autumn speaks on the panel about whether these efforts will be carried forward, and how it will be remembered, and the history—within colonization—of erasure. And in the background, her baby Sunrise calls out.
“I hear from other people, peers in New York and the Northwest Coast, that there’s something significant happening in the Southwest and happening in Albuquerque. I hope when, you know, when it becomes a history, that it is our history. And that it’s not somebody else’s history, and it’s not re-written in the context of the colonizer, of the city of Albuquerque, or of Mayor Berry or Mayor Keller or somebody who recently moved here and opened up a bar or a coffee shop, and said, ‘I put my mark on the city with this type of music or art.’ Because as indigenous women, our historic context is extinction. When you hear about indigenous people in other parts of the country, the way that indigenous people are talked about in public schools, is that we don’t exist anymore.”
Autumn also talks about the long and continuing growth of boundary-pushing efforts by experimentalists in this region.
“For over a decade, there has been this group in Albuquerque, who has been doing not just this one festival, but engaging as a community and supporting one another as musicians and artists and supporting each other’s art that, 15 years ago, didn’t have the respect that it does now,” Autumn says. “The idea of noise and performance art really didn’t have a space in Albuquerque. Now you can go to a bar, and you can see abstract art. That has a lot to do with these women on stage. When it comes to community-building, you have to be a part of the community, which, it requires longevity. Community-building isn’t something that can happen overnight. This is something that has taken years and decades to accomplish and it’s very important that—Hi baby! That’s my baby.”
Somebody in the audience raises a hand to ask me if I’m influenced by Laurie Anderson, or the Fluxus movement of experimental artists from the 60s and 70s. “I didn’t know about Fluxus,” I say. “I didn’t know about any of that stuff when I was getting started, not at all. The thing that’s really interesting about working with technology though, especially, is that technology is moving really fast, and when Laurie Anderson was getting started, there wasn’t the kind of tech that we have right now.
So, you know, we’re at this like precipice of music, where we just had this new introduction, which is electronics. It’s pretty recent. And we as human culture, we don’t know yet, all the possibilities of this right? We don’t know all the things that we’re going to do. We don’t know about that yet. And so, you know, that’s where we’re headed. That’s what we’re figuring out. That’s what a lot of my mentors have talked to me about is just that we’re like at this infant stage with this stuff. We’re really really really at the beginning of that. But we’re not at the beginning of performance and music-making. All of those things carry forward and still hold true for everyone who’s working in any kind of genre.”
Professor Ana Alonso Minutti reflects on the history of musicology and academia. “We operate in a system that is still under the legacy of colonial powers. Even though there have been other instances of tackling this topic within the field of ethnomusicology, I think that it hasn’t been a topic at the forefront of the discipline, but I obviously believe that it should be.”
Ana has researched our music festival Gatas y Vatas at length. Many years ago, she sent me an email, and because of my long-brewing distrust of university systems, I didn’t respond. A mentor, Manny Rettinger, vouched, talked me into meeting with her. And that began her long study of our efforts, her writing about us, her presenting our work on panels. The symposium marked the first time she was ever on stage with us in-person, though.
“And in a place such as New Mexico with a history of double colonization, it becomes more urgent,” she says. “So that is why I decided to have that not only as a topic for a symposium but also to invite people who are in different in stages in thinking about this concept, and also not only in different stages but in different ways of approaching it. So, from the theory standpoint, from the pedagogy standpoint, from performance standpoint.”
Ana organized the entire symposium, and our invitation came from her. After it was over, I wondered how it all looked and felt to her. I wondered if we had taken it all too far, or if she felt OK about what had happened as she presented us to her colleagues from all over the country. This audio reflection project gave me an opportunity to ask directly. And it only occurs to me right now, that flipping these roles, interviewing the ethnomusicologist who studied us, is another subversion.
“I could tell from where I was standing that some people felt uncomfortable,” Ana says. “Some people felt excited. Some people felt angry, or at least that’s the reaction that I could read from where I was. But see, that’s the thing, that there were reactions, and that is what ultimately I was trying to grasp: How what was happening was motivating some sort of visceral outcome.
And ultimately I do think that that’s a way to respond to the question: What does a decolonizing performance sound like or look like. How does it look? Well, that’s an answer. And I do think the fact that, at some point in our Q and A, mics were not as loud and the manipulation of the sounds and the loops and the layers of noise were obstructing the linear communication of the message, I thought that also that was a way to understand that sometimes, in order to understand decolonization, we have to understand how uncomfortable even that notion is.
Because we are so happy just being comfortable, and understanding that whoever the speaker is, needs to talk to us in a certain way. When in fact, what if that speaker doesn’t want to? Why can’t we just open our ears to listen in other ways? Or to receive information through our bodies? Not even through our mind, but through our bodies? Why can’t we just listen to, let’s say, the sound? Not the words. Are there other ways to communicate but language? Well, of course, right?
So I was thinking about it more and more, and when I spoke about this in New York last week, I was realizing how special that session was. And I was regretting the fact that we couldn’t document it better. And I was actually told: You have to write about it. We have to write about it, Marisa. We have to write about this. Because again, from your vantage point, and from my vantage point as an academic, quote-unquote, there needs to be a space to voice these things in our different arenas of power, so to speak. I don’t want this just to remain in the memory of those who were there.”