A challenging site-specific work, Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves connects narratives of the San Francisco Bay Area’s complicated relationship with water – usage, access, rights — to overlapping Navajo creation stories in which water figures prominently. Both a concert performance and an installation, Tremble Staves is performed from memory by The Living Earth Show outdoors, on public land, using water as a dynamic percussion instrument. It is also important that Tremble Staves include the participation of students and teachers; in two of the movements (Delta and Distributary), the act of teaching and relaying information in real time is an audible and visual element of the composition. The first iteration of the work was presented in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Art in the Parks Program in the ruins of Sutro Baths.

This performance is made possible by the UC Davis Department of Music.