Program Notes for MOOR MOTHER

Moor Mother
September 14, 2024
McGuire Theater

Moor Mother

Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) — voice, electronics, sound making toys

Angel Bat Dawid — piano, clarinet, voice, miscellaneous instruments

Douglas Ewart — saxophones, flutes, invented instruments

Kyle Kidd — vocals

Luke Stewart — bass

Melissa Almaguer — tap dancer

Melvin Gibbs — electric guitar and bass

Tcheser Holmes — drums

The performance runs approximately 85 minutes including a 15 minute intermission.

Please join us for a Q&A with Moor Mother immediately following the performance.

Accessibility Notes

ASL interpretation is planned for this performance.

Content Note: This performance contains themes of colonialism and slavery.

For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.

For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.

About Moor Mother

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Ayewa’s work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival.

Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. She specializes in practical concepts, but works in speculation and historical concepts. Moor Mother creates soundscapes using field sounds and archival sound collage in order to create sonic maps that allow us to journey to our buried histories and futures. She is an artist who, through writing, music, film, visual art, socially engaged art, and creative research, explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming oppressive linear temporalities into empowering, alternative temporalities. Her work seeks to inspire practical techniques of vision and agency against a forever expanding re -conquering of land, housing, and health in Black communities.

Ayewa is a Pew Fellow, a The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, a Leeway Transformation Award, a Blade of Grass Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, and a Rad Girls Philly Artist of the Year. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, WORM! Rotterdam residency, and the Creative Capital and CERN collide residency with Black Quantum Futurism.

Learn More

Ayewa’s recent large-scale work, The Great Bailout, uses as its starting point the United Kingdom’s 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which gave tax bailouts to former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people. The resulting unwavering sonic meditation—dark, powerful, deeply political and personal—is a nonlinear word map that charts connections across colonialism, slavery, and commerce in Great Britain, along with its modern parallels in the United States.

Ayewa released The Great Bailout as a proper album in March of 2024. It was followed a few months later by an expanded edition, which included earlier versions of the pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra. This site-specific performance of The Great Bailout at the Walker, presented in partnership with Liquid Music, is the first large-scale presentation of the project in the United States.

Shortly before her arrival at the Walker, Ayewa sat down with her collaborator Brandon Stosuy to discuss the project for Walker Reader. The following is an excerpt of their conversation:

Brandon Stosuy

The Great Bailout, the basis for your performance at the Walker: Can you give a bit of background on it?

Camae Ayewa

The project came about when I was commissioned by the Tusk Festival in England to present a work with an orchestra and to create a theme. At that moment, when I was thinking what I could do, I felt it was imperative to focus on a historical moment that still has its residue, or remnants, here in the present. This was, of course, a risky move, to put this type of work out there, but I felt that we had to honor the creative mind and honor all the things that have happened on this planet, really. To dwell into that and close the timeline.

BS

This is the first full-scale performance of The Great Bailout in the U.S. How did you arrive at the approach for the Walker performance?

CA

My approach was to pick the right ingredients. It’s important to me to have elders who have set the foundation of this thing that we are doing, as a creative music, to continue to pull them in. To treat these moments as continual learning processes, not so much of a mastered work and then tour it around. Like I said earlier, this idea of the work being continuously able to move—not just forward, but back and forth in time.

It’s important to do this work in America because the connections are so deep and so entangled with what is happening now with race, class, war, justice, and liberation.

There is a great tradition of creative Black music at the Walker Art Center, and it really comes like a full-circle moment—of presenting this work where it needs to be, where there’s a history of the avant-garde, where there’s a history of creative music. And not just creative for creative sake, but creative for the liberation of the art form. I think this is very important.

It’s important to continue the legacies, and not just continue them, but to continue the fire burning, the sacrifice. To acknowledge the sacrifice that so many of these great musicians, my heroes, put into the work. The dedication. It’s very important to me to play these institutions that have always had their pulse on what’s happening and creative music.

Read the full article here: Sounds Continue to Migrate: A Conversation with Moor Mother

Living Land Acknowledgement

The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today. 

We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself. 

We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work. 

Thanks to our partners

About Liquid Music

Walker Art Center Acknowledgments

Walker Art Center Producers’ Council

About the Walker Art Center

Media Partner

To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2023/24 Walker Performing Arts Season.