Dorian Wood's CANTO DE TODES / SONG FOR ALL to Close Park Avenue Armory's 2024 Public Programming

Park Avenue Armory will close out its 2024 Public Programming series, Making Space at the Armory, with Canto de Todes / Song for All, a 12-hour composition and installation by singer and performance artist Dorian Wood (she/they) on Saturday, October 19 from 11am to 11pm. Inspired by a lyric written by the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra, the work combines a genre-defying canon of folk, pop, and experimental music of Central and Latin America. Redeveloped and re-envisioned in harmony with the Armory's historic period rooms and specifically honoring the craftspeople that constructed the building at its inception, this Armory commission spotlights timely issues of migration and emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change.

"Dorian Wood's Canto de Todes is a resonant meditation on migration, a theme central to a nation like ours, built by generations of immigrants," says Guggenheim fellow and Armory Curator of Public Programming Tavia Nyong'o. "At a time when our historic tradition of welcoming newcomers is being tested, Wood's music honors the resilience and dignity of the sojourner. As a keynote for ASAP, an organization dedicated to uplifting the art of the present, I hope this performance inspires us all to bear witness to the urgent artistic voices calling out in the wilderness."

Canto de Todes / Song for All is divided into three movements throughout the course of its 12 hours. The day begins with Movement 1, an hour of live chamber music performed by Dorian Wood with cellists Ethan Philbrick, Mizu Issei, Titilayo, and Adrián Gonzalez Cortes and guitarist Alexander Noice. Movement 2 begins at 12pm and runs until 10pm; audiences can experience a pre-recorded ambient, multi-channel sound installation. Wood has tapped New York-based interdisciplinary artist Riven Ratanavanh (they/them) to collaborate on this movement, providing pop-up performances in the installation space to further activate and interact with Wood's composition. Finally, Movement 3 closes out the day's festivities; Wood returns to the Veterans Room with their collaborating musicians and a chorus of around 20 for a final hour-long chamber piece. Canto de Todes was premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles, California in February 2023; this presentation, which marks the piece's East Coast premiere, has been adapted both to New York and Park Avenue Armory.

The performance will be accompanied by two installations on a loop from 12pm to 6:30pm in the Armory's first floor historic rooms. These include: a film program about Audre Lorde curated by Michael Gillespie; and a multi-channel work featuring the contributions of 10 filmmakers, writers, and orators from throughout the Americas including Génesis Mancheren Ab'äj, Óscar Moisés Díaz, Kenia Guillen, Leslie Arely Martinez, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, and Frisly Soberanis, curated by the Tierra Narrative poetry collective.

Canto de Todes / Song for All is a keynote performance of ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, an in-person conference from October 17 to 19 by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. In the Armory's second floor company rooms, ASAP is presenting a series of conference panels to complement Dorian Wood's piece. Panels include: "Catostrophic Forgetting" with Zeynep Abes, Chantal Eyong, and Luke Fischbeck; "with/hood: performing temporalities of luxury" with Maria Gaspar, Amina Ross, Anna Martine Whitehead, and Patricia Nguyen; "Break, rest, build - poetic measures of care and creation" with E.T. Russian, Ashleigh Allen, Sarah Joan MacLean, and Cathy de la Cruz; "Ecopoetics Workshop" with Simon Eales and Brooke Bastie; "Not a Luxury But Which Luxuriates: Experimental Translation De Luxe" with the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective; and "The Luxury of Painting the Archive?: Rascuache Artist Illustrating Deportation Stories at the US-Mexico Border" with Kevin Dutan, Ariel Morales, and Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana. For more information on the conference, please visit artsofthepresent.org.

Held in the Armory's historic period rooms and spaces, Making Space at the Armory is an insightful series of cutting-edge conversations, performances, and activations curated by writer and scholar Tavia Nyong'o that provides a unique forum for bridging art and culture. Previously this season, Making Space presented multidisciplinary artist Richard Kennedy's latest commission Guttural (Conducted Contact) as a capstone performance for The Radical Practice of Black Curation: A Symposium in partnership with Princeton University, April 12; poet and scholar Claudia Rankine invited audiences and participants to interrogate the ways in we disagree through the symposium Antagonisms: A Gathering, featuring a performance of choreographer Shamel Pitts' [Essence of] Touch of Red. On September 8, Day for Night: A Salon on Art and Nightlife, gathered nightlife celebrities and scholars for an afternoon of conversation on the role performance, music, and nightlife play in self-expression, individual identity, and society, presented in conjunction with R.O.S.E.

TICKETING

Tickets at $35 may be purchased by phone through the Armory Box Office at (212) 933-5812, Monday through Friday from 10am to 6pm; and online at armoryonpark.org.

For registration for the full ASAP/15: Not a Luxury conference, please visit the conference website here.