Decolonial Imaginings
Online. July-October 2020
Decolonial Imaginings was a series of workshops co-curated by Dylan Robinson and Mitch Renaud that asked a group of non-Indigenous settler composers to identify structures of settler colonialism in composition, and imagine new forms of decolonial composition. The project included Luke Nickel, Jocelyn Morlock, jake moore, Juliet Palmer, Mitch Renaud, and Kelly Ruth, and took place over three stages. First, the six participants and co-curators came together in a group conversation to raise questions and offer prompts for reflection from their readings of Robinson’s book Hungry Listening. Second, each composer created a new work in the form of an imagined composition that was presented as an audio description of the composition; these audio descriptions were then discussed among the group. Finally, all artists joined the co-curators to reflect on the process as a whole.
Decolonial Imaginings Website: https://www.of-the-now.ca/decolonialimaginings/
Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts
Curator, Dylan Robinson. Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
The works performed in the Ka’tarohkwi festival (Winter 2019) demand a reconsideration of our listening privilege(s); they unsettle “settler colonial” listening certainty; they refuse the hunger of the voracious ear in its appetite for quick information; and they re-engage listening mobility and itinerancy from regimes of listening settlement.
nuyamł-ił kulhulmx (singing the earth)
Music Installation, by Anna Höstman & Dylan Robinson
1) Victoria Symphony Orchestra March 2019
2) Vancouver Symphony Orchestra February 2017
3) Continuum Contemporary Music, Wychwood Theatre, Toronto December 2013
nuyamł-ił kulhulmx (singing the earth), is a response to the people, environment and spirit of the Bella Coola Valley of coastal British Columbia. It draws on historical and contemporary sources in four languages—Nuxalk, Norwegian, English and Japanese and is the collaborative artistic effort of myself, Anna Höstman (composer), Patrick Nickleson and Marion Newman, with the support and assistance of the people of the Bella Coola Valley. nuyamł-ił kulhulmx is a collection of eccentricities— it is as much an archive of interviews, photographs, video, erasure poems, ethnography, and history as it is a work of concert music.
Soft / SOFT
Mandela Hall, University of Sussex, 2008
A response to Franco Donatoni’s composition for solo Bass Clarinet, SOFT. Collaborative creation by Dylan Robinson (director/writer), Heather Roche (Bass Clarinet), Ben Oliver (composition), and Karen Schaller.
Never Swim Alone
Play by Daniel McIvor
Directed by Heather Lindsay
Featuring actors Billy Marchenski, Angela Bespflug, Tricia Collins, Tyler McClendon, Dylan Robinson
Burrard Aquatic Centre “Kiddies Pool”, Vancouver September 2002
SFU Theatre, Burnaby, BC September 2002
Havana Theatre, Vancouver August 2001
Excerpts from Never Swim Alone
Two boys on a beach. The last day of summer before school begins. Nearby is a girl. She lies in the sun with her blue bathing suit on her green beach towel listening to her yellow transistor.
She turns her head a little over her shoulders and speaks to the boys: “Race you to the point?”
And the winner has, and will always, rule. That is the way of the world. Like battle, like business, like love. A few may fall along the way but compared to the prize, what are a few. And the prize is what you want and what you want is what you hear in every mouth, every buzz, every bell, every crack, every whisper.
Don’t be afraid.
The thing we must remember is how to balance compassion and desire. Beware compassion. Compassion will lose the race. Compassion is illogical. If you let it, compassion will kill desire. Especially the desire to be first.
And being first my friend is the point.
