2020 + 2021:
Launched in 2019, we wove Tuning Scores with the physical labor of tending the land and through this process we launched Tuning4Armageddon. Tuning Culture evolved to meet climate, health, and housing crises as opportunities to enact collective survival.
In 2020, we translated a project intent for three collective practices to offer laboratories for primarily QTBiPOC Bay Area dancer/artist/activists as shelter-in-place rose; instead we incubated and researched what was possible. In collaboration with two East Bay, black, artist-led land-based housing collectives, blaQyard and The Garden. In late 2020, we organized a several-month collective stewardship and artistic tunings based on Ohlone lands which continued throgh the following summer and year. We offered potent project sessions, gaining further insight into how Tuning can provide tools to empower collectives beyond dance context into worlds of gardening, leadership, organizing and providing functional support.
Our experiences over time demonstrated how tuning offers an embodied-ecological perspective to community dialogue and cultural transformation. The project merges aesthetic, cultural, racial, decolonial, and land-based dialogue, bringing creative and compositional practice to a diverse group of practitioners in the hopes that those present invent and invest how tunings can be offered as unique applications as shared network across fields. Tuning provides a set of tools and a way of practice that is uniquely suited for collective communication.
Co-facilitated and co-direcby Emelia aka Jubilee July, James Amutabi Connie Haines, Margit Galanter, and Zoe Huey.
Artists included: Ricardo Alvarez, KaLima Amilak, Gabriela Christian, Chibueze Crouch, Naomi Lee, Mama Lisa, Tara Shi, Amani Will / Wa Ama & the Lion Truth, and more.
2022:
With James Amutabi Haines as Project Director, Tuning4Armageddon transmuted into further support for the two collectives, who lead their own respective creative projects. Some of these materials are archived on the T4A instagram site created by Amutabi here: @Tuning4Armageddon, an expression as Indigenous Human Technology. Another one of the major projects of created by Amutabi and Rico was called Owed to the Bay.
"One of the earlier roots of T4A was Tuning Culture, a project to bring Tuning to the local culture of Unceded Ohlone Land, and also to express the potential for an exploration and dialogue on cultural practices through tuning scores, through movement, through dance. The project evolved into T4A, and has been changed over and over through the people who organize it, through different phases of our multiple pandemics, communions, encounters, and apocalypses. One of the main propositions we were working with initially was to support a small group tuners in the States who have been utilizing the scores and to bring some new tuners into the mix - hence creating a “tuning culture”; we asked, how would the scores provide a different set of meaning in a predominantly QTBIPoC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) artist context, with a population that is effected by housing crisis and therefore their art practice is effected as well; and finally, how are the scores specifically useful for collective communication and cultural work? The original working group was comprised of Jubilee July (Bay Area), Julie Nathanielsz (Ithaca, Austin), Karen Nelson (Vashon, WA), Leyya Tawil (Bay Area, Detroit, New York), Lisa Nelson (Northeast Kingdom, Vermont) Margit Galanter (Bay Area), mayfield brooks (NYC), estrellx supernova (Bay Area, Now LA), and Ray Chung (Bay Area, Sweden). The workshop was larger and many of those folks continue to practice in different practice set-ups."