Marcus Oldham - a 2009 Jack Straw Artist Support Program participant - and company will discuss their upcoming concert "Remembering Catherine," a collective exploration of place, heritage, and ancestral memory through sound and image.

The Indigenous peoples of North America have always celebrated the process of creating music as an intrinsic, simple, and consequential response to the cycles within life itself. Standing in contradiction is the traditional Western attitude that music is primarily a craft, an expressive yet intellectual act that engages the listener from only a polite distance. Are the sensuous and the aesthetic dimensions of musical expression this delineated? Or do they intuitively exist without contradiction? Are they fundamentally congruent, inseparable, interdependent? Together can they shape a centering impulse that embraces human experience, guiding us in a moment towards immediacy and connectivity? Via an assemblage of modern musical gesture, ancient song, Indigenous language, diverse instrumentation, and poignant historically-inspired imagery, these are some of the questions "Remembering Catherine" seeks to answer.

Marcus Oldham is a classical composer and performing keyboardist residing in Seattle; Chenoa Egawa is an Indigenous composer and a member of the Lummi and S'Klallam Coast Salish nations of WA State; and Ethan Delavan is a Seattle-based filmmaker.