Tremble Staves
Raven Chacon
With The Living Earth Show & Virginia Grise
Co-Presented by Fusebox, Texas Performing Arts, UT-Austin’s Butler School of Music Percussion Ensemble
October 13, 2023 | Laguna Gloria
Curated by Robin K. Williams as part of This Land
Performance Organized by Emmy Laursen & Danny Orendorff
In conjunction with the exhibition This Land at the Jones Center, Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves was performed at Laguna Gloria. Conceived as a site-specific work originally presented at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco, Tremble Staves considers the sanctity and scarcity of water, and tells a story of the land where the work is presented.
The site-responsive adaptation was performed on the shore of the Colorado River at The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria on Oct 13 in partnership with Texas Performing Arts, Fusebox, and The University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music Percussion Ensemble. Featuring Bay Area musicians The Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson), Tremble Staves was be accompanied by an original narrative written by Austin-based interdisciplinary artist and writer, Virginia Grise.
About the Artist
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Borealis Festival, Seattle; SITE Santa Fe; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Ende Tymes Festival, New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Biennial, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Carnegie International, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Since 2004, he has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022).
