Nonbinary artist to debut 12-hour art installation Canto de Todes in LA

REDCAT, the California Institute of the Arts downtown L.A. center for contemporary art, presents the world premiere of acclaimed Los Angeles-based Latinx non-binary musician / artist Dorian Wood’s (she/they) new immersive music performance-installation Canto de Todes (Song of Everyone) on Friday, February 3rd at 8:30pm.

Canto de Todes (Song of Everyone) is a collaborative and intimate 12-hour composition and installation, broken into three movements. Inspired by a lyric of the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra, this Creative Capital-awarded project emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change and invites the audience to stay for as long as they wish over the course of the performance.

Movement I is an hour-long live chamber piece and begins as an exchange between Wood and another musician, or two musicians, or several musicians, creating a collaborative intimacy that will serve as a foundation for the remaining 11 hours of the piece.

Movement II is a ten-hour immersive sonic and spatial experience that will prompt the audience to wander the accessible space around them. In this movement, the entire complex will be equipped with monitors that play different elements of a pre-recorded composition. Audience members can experience the unfolding of Movement II from their own individual perspectives; a “mix” unique to each person informed by wherever they choose to be. Movement II is an 8-channel pre-recorded composition comprised of dozens of layers of Wood’s voice, enhanced by strategic lighting, projections and collaborations with other performers that occur throughout the 10-hour composition, creating a multi-sensory space in which audiences can remain as long as they wish. 

Movement III is the final hour, in which the pre-recorded Movement II will interweave with a cantata for three voices and chamber ensemble entitled “La Hill”. This movement is a dream-like narrative piece about Wood’s childhood home in Los Angeles, and the 30+ years their family spent there after emigrating from Costa Rica. “La Hill” is the culmination of Canto de Todes, as a tribute to Wood’s family, bringing this inspired journey full circle.

Said Wood, “The format of Canto de Todes is meant to defy people’s expectation of the rigidness often associated with witnessing chamber music performances, and instead offer a welcoming space that allows for individuals to project their personal and communal joys and traumas. My hope with Canto de Todes is to tour it as broad and wide as possible, mutating and expanding with ongoing collaborations with artists local to each region, and work toward a future of acknowledgment over inclusion, and of reparations over acceptance. My dream would be that five, 10, 20 years from now, audiences will enter their own versions ofCanto de Todes with the curiosity of experiencing something new and of the moment, custom-modified for their community, and informed by accumulated layers of ancestral energy.”

For more information and to purchase tickets click here.