09/16 |Recognition at The Drawing Center, New York

The Stone at The Drawing Center: Music and Visuals curated by John Zorn present Recognition.

The Drawing Center is located at : 35 Wooster St,  New York 10013

Tickets here.

Recognition is an unique performance that includes film and music, in which singer and composer Sara Serpa demonstrates her talent in directing and producing a visual narrative using never seen footage, recently found in her family archives, of Portugal and ex-colony Angola, in the 1960’s, by then a fascist and colonizer regime. This footage has been edited and transformed into a sensorial experience, in which music and image invite the viewer/ listener to reflect on history in a non-literal way. With an extraordinary ensemble featuring Zeena Parkins on harp and Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, the music will flow into written and improvised material.

Born in Lisboa, Portugal, four years after the 1975 Revolution that liberated the country from a 40 year-long authoritarian regime, Sara Serpa descends from a family that moved to Angola in 1910 when it was still a Portuguese colony. Serpa’s grandfather and both parents were born in Angola and have experienced the development and fall of the empire from a very personal perspective. Her parents were part of a  politically active generation that rebelled against the colonial regime, the colonial war and the repressive policies of  the dictator Salazar.

Serpa’s personal research focus on her country’s colonial past is an attempt to understand the intersection between family stories and a nation that continuously avoids dealing with a history that is so recent and alive in its mindset.