Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Partch broke with European tradition and forged a new music based on primal integration of sound and speech, using self-designed instruments tuned with natural acoustic resonance or just intonation. The result was a beautiful sound and vision with “magical purpose.”
“Dream” (1948) was written for Merce Cunningham’s dance, minimal fixed tones of sustained resonance, influenced by Balinese Gamelan and divinations through the I Ching.
The tuning for “Our Rainy Season” resembles a scale once found among the Chopi people of Mavila, Mozambique, an area that experiences a severe rainy season.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai independent filmmaker, created an extraordinary experience, vision, dream, meditation with “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.”
The metaphorical island of Anaphoria is fertile territory for microtonal composer and sound artist Kraig Grady. One senses in his ringing, vibrating, just intonations, Native American chants, Indonesian gamelan orchestras, Japanese gagaku, African drumming down the spirits steeped in harmonic relations found in nature.
Short poems, anecdotes, mocking or reverent tributes, called calaveras or “skulls,” are given to celebrate public or private figures. In Los Angeles, for the last seven years Tropico de Nopal Gallery has taken the custom into the realm of performance art-fashion show-walking altar display.
The Bagobo are an indigenous Proto-Austronesian tribe of Mindanao in southern Philippines. Here is a traditional Bagobo Agung ensemble taken by anthropologist Robert Garfias during the 1960s.