Cities And Memory

Researching this sound and the U’wa people gave me an opportunity to scratch the surface of their deeply complex seasonal customs, involving dance, storytelling and performance. Ann Osborn (the sound recordist) documents this in her study "The Four Seasons of the U'wa: A Chibcha Ritual Ecology in the Colombian Andes".What I learned inspired me to tell a new story. In this piece you hear about Ray Collective, a dance group who couldn't be more culturally, temporally or geographically removed from the U’wa, but for whom performative seasonal ritual is the connective tissue. Looking back on it, I can see how this piece subconsciously reflected my wrangling with the ethics of this project and concerns I had around cultural appropriation. It's interesting that even in Ray Collective, where members are drawing from and reworking a shared UK-based cultural/folk heritage, similar themes about what constitutes respectful reinterpretation and what is fair to use or repurpose came up a lot. It got me thinking about the