Community Choral Music in Reperforming Oral Histories

Dr. Luis Sotelo Castro and PhD candidate Sara Lucas from the Acts of Listening Lab and The Listening Choir will discuss how musical interventions, particularly community choral music, can catalyze dialogue in communities that have experienced collective trauma. We will explore how this form of participatory art, whether used in reperformances of oral histories or ancient plays, can be used as a tool for performing listening in a restorative justice context. Speaking to their experiences producing “Llamado y Respuesta: Quien a escuchar a Cesar Lasso?,” Dr. Sotelo Castro will highlight how he used community collaboration to support further audience participation within these dialogic spaces.

“Llamado y Respuesta: Quien a escuchar a Cesar Lasso?” uses headphones verbatim (a documentary theatre technique) and choral singing to reconstruct moments of a hearing of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace set up in 2016 in Colombia as a war crimes tribunal to enable victims of war crimes to be heard and ex-rebels and other offenders to admit responsibility and contribute to repairing the damages caused. It focuses on the statements by Cesar Lasso, a police officer who was held hostage for thirteen years, five months and one day by the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).”