Live Experiences
We unite traditional musicians, remix artists, and storytellers to co-create public, immersive, multi-disciplinary gatherings where music, storytelling, and community is medicine.
About The Program
More Than a Concert
The dominant model for experiencing live music is the concert: a passive audience in rows, facing a stage, watching performers elevated above them. Tickets are sold. The performance happens. Money changes hands. Everyone goes home.
This model mirrors the extractive logic that has historically silenced the traditions we work with — culture becomes product, artist becomes supplier, audience becomes consumer.
In most of the world's oldest musical traditions, music was never meant to be consumed. It was meant to be inhabited.
The Gnawa lila draws everyone into trance through hours of communal invocation. The Son Jarocho fandango is a circle around a wooden platform, not a stage. The Palestinian dabke is a line of bodies striking the earth together. Music as ceremony, audience as participant, experience as transformation.
Our Approach
RC's Live Experiences are designed in that spirit. They are gatherings — co-created with our partnering traditional musicians, remix artists, and storytellers — where the boundary between performer and audience dissolves.
Each gathering weaves ancestral musical wisdom with contemporary creative tools: live traditional music, electronic and video remixes, storytelling, and projection. Audiences feel the deep transmissions of ancestors and, in the same breath, renewed hope for the future.
Each gathering is a demonstration: another kind of cultural gathering is possible. Communal rather than transactional. Uplifting rather than extractive. Leaving participants not just entertained, but changed.
Past Live Experiences
“I have been so moved by what you and the artists put together tonight I just feel compelled to let you know in the moment. [...] The depth of our crisis is met by the exponential rise in possibility flowing from our most primal virtue—our capacity to cooperate. Music gives us the vision in our bodies, and you have tapped something very powerful tonight.”
—Tanfis I Live participant
“This was easily the best musical event I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a lot. I felt like we went on a journey of storytelling, empathy, and music as a community. I felt so connected to the performers and everyone in the audience.”
— Tanfis II Live participant
“Mad respect for the vision and execution of something truly special and meaningful….Palestinian culture is indescribably beautiful: heartbroken, funny, furious, wise, reverent, defiant, endlessly ingenious… it’s a people asserting their humanity through music, art, textiles, food,…[and] some of the most incredible musicianship. Even I, Mr. Anti-Zionism, Mr. Friend to Palestine, I realized how much I didn’t know about Palestinians.”
— Daniel Maté, Tanfis II Live participant
"omg. that was a highlight lifetime experience for me. the love, the prayers and lineage holders, the grace and skill, the collective and the DNA of the best of humanity. I am so grateful and honored and thrilled to have been in that audience last night to be a sacred witness (and thereby participant) of that magic."
— Tanfis III Live participant
“What a beautiful way to be human— to bring ancestral music from so many lineages together into this moment. What transpired in nothing less than a direct transmission from spirit. Tanfis is a true embodiment of what it means to collaborate.”
— Jaye Johnson, Tanfis IV Live participant
Upcoming Live Experiences
