TUTTI Festival concert X presented by the Vail Series: 'We Are Good':

The Denison Department of Music presents the TUTTI Festival Concert X: “We Are Good” presented by the Vail Series. 

Praised by the New York Times for its “conviction, authority, and finesse,” the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble harnesses the collaborative spirit of chamber music to reach beyond the traditionally-perceived limits of classical music. The ensemble’s artistic, educational, and civic programs engage theater groups, video game designers, corporate innovators, and folk bands to share stories as diverse as the communities it serves.

As our final concert of the TUTTI 2022 Festival, “We Are Good” is an experimental music/theater residency and performance process developed with writer/director and civic practice pioneer Michael Rohd and theater artist/practitioner Quenna Lené Barrett that explores the ways we as a community deal with the past and imagine our futures. Designed to foster authentic inquiry among audiences of varied social and political backgrounds, “We Are Good” uses techniques developed with Deep Listening practitioners Leila Ramagopal Pertl and Brian Pertl to bring strangers together through communal music-making in an original work that provokes participants to explore: What role should the past play in decisions about the future? How do past events shape us? What responsibility do we have for what happened before we were alive? How does a community make hard choices together? Who do we believe?

An open framework for the process of tackling difficult questions as a group, “We Are Good” includes Deep Listening and story circle residency sessions during the TUTTI 2022 week that invite discussion on moments of challenging collective decision-making, how past events shape current community decisions, and how people’s lived experience around that decision-making today differs based on their identity, economic reality, and culture.

The project culminates in a participatory public performance, which includes creative acts generated by participants through their residency across various departments at Denison.