How Can We Not Sing II

How Can We Not Sing is part of Artists Respond: Combating Social Isolation, a project of Springboard for the Arts. The Artist Respond commissions empowers artists to find ways to address the isolation and sense of disconnection that has come with the pandemic. For this event, three experienced artists on two continents will take the audiences remotely through the creation process of an excerpt from a larger recent work, How Can We Not Sing, which will debut in 2021.

How Can We Not Sing is a chamber opera that will be developed by composer Yan Pang in response to the current issue of solidarity between Asian and Black people all over the world, drawing on her own experiences growing up in China, and her family’s multigenerational history there. We believe this type of anti-racist collaborative project centers the vital role of art to bring us together. Audience members will engage with music and dance creators and each other in a more intimate virtual setting to reflect on the social justice themes raised by the work, and how they can be empowered to ask questions and take action in their communities.

We will begin with the performance of the music and dance piece and then take participants through three collaborative components: lyrical content, music composition, choreography, and end with a discussion and Q&A session. This project is designed for music creators, artists from other disciplines who want to work with music creators, and people interested in understanding this type of process. This experience will bring these groups together to have a conversation about social justice through art creation.

Join on Saturday, December 26, 2020 at 10am CST.

Learn more here.

Production Team

Songwriter: Yan Pang is a composer, performer, and scholar. She is currently an adjunct instructor of music at the University of Minnesota, where she received her Ph.D. in Music with a minor in Theater Arts & Dance. Her work focuses on inter-cultural music composition and performance. As part of this interest, she has been commissioned to compose and invited to perform in music festivals throughout the world. Her upcoming performance, “MIXTAPE IV: Now Streaming,” will be performed at the Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts in February 2021. To learn more, please visit www.yanpangcreate.com.

Producer: AK is a composer/musician now living in Warsaw, Poland. After finishing a Master’s degree study about the theory of harmony in the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, she moved to Poland. She tended to create music pieces to combine electronic sounds, visual material, and contemporary methods. She works as a freelance musician and has her own band Pomponika. AK composes, produces, sings, and performs different instruments. In her works, the text is as important as the music itself. Topics involve reflections about domestic violence, modern industry, nationalism, homophobia, also some inner thoughts about life, emotion, or death. More of her music can be found on Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pomponika/.

Choreographer: J-Sun is a long-term practitioner of several street dance forms, which he teaches, choreographs, theorizes, and performs. He believes in being accountable to the community, challenging tradition, and artistic collaboration as a crucial element of social change. He is the Artistic Director for the MIXTAPE series at the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts. J-Sun is pursuing a Ph.D. in Theater Historiography at the University of Minnesota and is the disciplinary head of the Hip Hop Dance track. His current choreographic and academic work focuses on using break(danc)ing to investigate agency, mobility, and power.