The premier East Harlem-based performing ensemble will present various songs of the plena repertoire, Puerto Rico’s “sung newspaper” genre, often used in processionals and holiday “caroling”. The genre itself is known to offer testimonials to everyday life: from the first day of school to protests on policy and beyond.

Los Pleneros de la 21 (LP21) was founded in 1983 byJuan J. ‘Juango’ Gutiérrez (National Endowment for the Arts’ Heritage Fellow, 1996) and the legendary Master Plenero, Marcial Reyes Arvelo. The ensemble has pioneered the road for Bomba and Plena performance around NYC, and continues to spread it globally for over 40 years. The ensemble received a Grammy nomination for their groundbreaking album with Smithsonian Folkways, Para Todos Ustedes. 

Their mission is to promote cultural continuity, community connection, and arts access of Puerto Rican cultural expressions through combined efforts of dynamic performances and compelling arts education centered on the Afro Puerto Rican expressions of Bomba and Plena.

From receding glaciers, via polluted rivers to fragile wetlands, rising water stresses across the world are impelling communities to foster more respectful and sustainable water cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects across Latin America, Lisa Blackmore proposes “hydrocommoning” as a conceptual horizon for creative practices that nurture connections and coalitions around bodies of water. A map of projects from the region shows how artists, curators, and communities are confronting legacies of harm with regenerative practices that combine aesthetic forms, territorial care, infrastructural interventions, connecting embodied experience to action.

Lisa Blackmore is Professor of Spanish and Director of the Digital Humanities Center at the University of Virginia. Her research, curatorial practice, and pedagogy probe water cultures in art and collective action. Since 2019, she has directed entre—ríos, a confluence of arts-led projects that explores continuities between bodies of water, human bodies and territories, recognizing rivers as active subjects that produce aesthetic forms, transform landscapes and shape memory. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Practices of Care Across the Americas, LA ESCUELA__JOURNAL. Her forthcoming monograph Hydrocommoning (University of Minnesota Press, 2027) shows how art addresses legacies of hydrocolonialism and modernization, confronts contemporary water stresses, and supports community organizing around bodies of water.

A dialogue between artist Natalia Lasalle-Morillo and composer Xenia Rubinos on the mobilizing use of the voice and their ongoing collaborative practice of directing choruses for nontraditional singers.  Rooted in improvisation, listening, and collective vocal experimentation, these projects explore the voice as a resonant carrier of material and immaterial memory embedded within specific spaces, histories, and communities. In each project, participants engage in vocal improvisation as a method for attuning to the social, historical, and acoustic traces held within these environments. 

The conversation reflects on two recent collaborations: one developed with Puerto Ricans residing in New York City and in Puerto Rico for the project En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, and another chorus staged within the abandoned theater of La Central Aguirre in Salinas, Puerto Rico.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (Bayamón, Puerto Rico) is an artist and director. Merging experimental film and theater methodologies, her practice examines memory and history through extensive and rigorous periods of research and co-creation. Presented as multi-channel video installations, short and long-form experimental films, and live theatrical performances, her work has been presented extensively in venues, festivals and theaters internationally. Exhibitions include the 61 International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York), Amant (New York), RedCat (Los Angeles), 22a SescVideoBrasil Biennial (São Paulo), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, among many others. She has taught film and theater at Maryland Institute of the Art, CalArts and Bard Microcollege, and facilitates workshops and knowledge exchanges as a way to socialize her artistic practice.

Xenia Rubinos is a Puerto Rican and Cuban vocalist, performing artist and composer from Hartford, Connecticut based in New York. The New Yorker describes her work as “rhythmically fierce, vocally generous music that escapes the net of any known genre.” Rubinos has released three critically acclaimed albums, toured internationally and presented a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR. Rubinos is assistant professor of Songwriting and Production graduate studies at Berklee College of Music’s NYC campus. Her recent project, Circulo de Voces, reimagines the choir as a public service and community resource giving voice to memory, new futures and a living embodied archive.

This concert explores the sonorities of water through hydraulic sculptures that recreate flows, rain, and runoff. These streams are intervened by sound instruments that respond to the forces of the geological world and interpret its voices. Through this performance, COLECTIVO WeReBeRe seeks to evoke our amniotic and amphibious memories. Human listening originated in a liquid environment, in intrauterine immersion—a space of care and plenitude where the self and the world were one—experiencing that first “oceanic feeling.” The sounds of aquatic zithers, flutes, and kalimbas, together with human lullabies, invite us to remember that we are the result of care. Water was and continues to be our first support, nourishment, and medicine.

COLECTIVO WeReBeRe is formed by Leonel Vásquez and Esmeralda Ramírez. WeReBeRe is interested in the pedagogy of listening as a political act, in the appropriation of the sonic condition of the body, and in the expanded perception of living environments. For over 14 years, they have practiced this through research and commissions from cultural centers, NGOs, and laboratories with rural, artisan, environmentalist, and ethnic communities.Their creative work focuses on communication between humans and the natural world, studying phonic systems and the effects of vibration. They have developed an inventory of experimental amphibious lutherie objects that release vibration toward the human body as a sonic organism.

Esmeralda Ramírez holds a degree in Music from the National Pedagogical University Bogotá, Colombia), and works with the voice and its multiple forms of expression. Her research into ancestral songs explores connection and the principle of vibration through the sonic body. Her creative interests focus on the study of the expanded voice developed in academic, pedagogical, and traditional contexts. Ramírez explores the voice as a medium that integrates worlds. From this perspective, she has participated in diverse projects with artists and expanded viewpoints that move beyond conventional musical frameworks. Her professional experience has significantly contributed to processes involving the body, listening, and voice as binding channels.

Leonel Vásquez is a sound artist who builds devices, spaces, and experiences for listening as a political, aesthetic, somatic, and regenerative act. His work focuses on more-than-human sonic agencies—water, trees, rocks, and other living and vibrating matter. His main interests include recognizing nature as a silent victim of Colombiaʼs armed conflict, as well as the symbolic and sacred reparation of rivers and forests. As an arts practitioner, he promotes relational listening practices and affective communities that contribute to the creation of acoustic agreements. He researches cosmo-resonance phenomena, the potential of singing in interspecies care, and acoustic-poetic restoration as contributions to systemic intelligence and planetary well-being.