The annual VLC Forum is anchored by the Community Dinner, which brings together program participants, the VLC and New School communities, and the public for a free dinner and celebration for all. This year’s event shines a light on how communities record, share, and safeguard their histories through food, music, ritual, and storytelling—acts of continuity, resistance, and joy. During political turmoil, oral traditions are especially powerful, serving not only as a means of preserving traditions and cultural memory, but also as a way to make sense of unfolding events and how they are understood by future generations.

On Friday, October 25, at 8 PM EDT, join us for an evening of food, music, and storytelling, celebrating and uplifting our community. The 2024 Community Dinner is catered by Palestinian bistro Ayat and features music by soundmaker and composer Luke Stewart, along with a special performance by Selfless Abandon, a collaboration between Stewart and visual artist Miriam Parker.

Selfless Abandon is an audiovisual performative practice aimed at deconstructing the creation process by exploring polarities as an instrumental part of all things born. This collaboration sees itself as an extension of the African American tradition of improvisation and the culture of the revolutionary mind. Both Parker and Stewart have been working extensively within the improvisational avant-garde genre, hoping to bring the duo into the context of other genres to bridge and connect traditions.

The collective explores the meeting point between dance, sound, and image rituals and how the play of sense perceptions work together in the transformative process. Luke Stewart plays with casting out nets of dynamic spaces through his physical movement language in interaction with the speaker. Miriam Parker plays with the dynamics of the soundscape using the physical language of archetypal images, tapping into lineage reimagined using the shifting of frequency and tone that Stewart creates. Movement is needed to generate feedback with the upright bass and amplifier. The result is something like a dance between the instruments and the musician. Choreographed movement brings this to light even more, while the use of video and sculpture acts to animate the space between movement and sound. In the work, the mediums’ roles shift to keep the transformative process evolving. Selfless Abandon is interested in Freedom.