January 2019
“A riot is the voice of the unheard,” Maxine Waters had said, about one of the most destructive civil disturbances in US history, the LA uprising of 1992. From its epicenter more than 25 years later, South LA teens unmute the history of their neighborhood through an unlikely instrument: a book. Centering on the story of an intellectually disabled boy and his talkative pet raven, the novel Barnaby Rudge was written by their creator Charles Dickens, who depicts the destruction of London in 1780 from the blended perspectives of the city’s inhabitants. The students, seniors at Foshay Learning Center, are taking their nineteenth century literature lesson out of the classroom and onto the streets, the stage and on the air—dropping an album, Never Say Die, A Sonic Tribute to the LA 1992 Rebellion, that uses sonic field recordings to make the link between the histories of uprising in two cities. They are also premiering their show next week (2 performances, February 1/2, 6PM), a theatrical and dance adaptation of the Dickensian story put up for their community and the public. The production and exhibition featuring their album will be held at their South LA campus, Foshay Learning Center, located a few blocks away from the businesses, homes, avenues and intersections that sustained some of the worst damage of the 1992 events.
The album and production culminate an immersive study of the novel in students’ AP English Literature class, the latest of “LitLabs”– interdisciplinary and engaged teaching projects directed and taught by Jacqueline Barrios, their teacher. Students are scholars with the University of Southern California’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), a college pathway program aimed at preparing first-generation students for higher education. NAI partners with the Dickens Project to support each LitLab journey, which guides students through the seemingly foreign world of the nineteenth century novel by assembling a cast of fellow travelers, weaving a unique pedagogical experience for students to build bridges between their world and the world of Dickens. From literary scholars to resident dance artists, from Dickens enthusiasts to researchers in urbanism and architecture, the cast of characters in the story of their learning mirrors the elaborate ones within the novels themselves.
The students’ album will officially “drop” in its own exhibition, LA 1992/London 1780: Sounding Out A Crowd, where a map installation and listening panels will contextualize and showcase the eleven original “singles” that students composed using an archive of found sounds from South LA and lyrics they wrote ala Dickens, riffing particularly off of his syntactic habit of writing long catalogs, or lists, in his multi-perspectival descriptions of the Gordon riots. The singles represent students’ reworking of Dickens’ treatment of mob violence, an account that complicates the innocence or guilt of any single actor or point of view. Supported by UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI), a graduate program blending architecture, urban planning and humanities research methods, the album and exhibition as a whole orchestrate an experience of the students’ sound projects, which serve as a sonic documentary of student learning and the neighborhood. Visitors will see how students blended the novel’s storytelling with an experimental one in which they operate traditional literary tools alongside urban humanistic ones: field work, sound scavenging, digital editing, urban research, interviews and mental mapping. The twelfth track in the album is an original piece by guest musician and composer Parker Hill (Spectral Acoustic) blending all of the students’ found sounds.
