The Zarabanda Variations is a group of visionary composers, performers, and poets creating a surprising and vibrant synthesis of Baroque, folkloric, and contemporary music of the American hemisphere. The members of the ensemble work across genres including traditional Mariachi and Baroque music, improvisation collectives in Mexico City and New York, and contemporary composition, creating new songs and dances inspired by the eclecticism of the zarabanda: a dance with Spanish, pre-Columbian American, and African origin stories. Woven in with the music is the poetry of Edgar Garcia, whose work maps the emergence of the Baroque through scenes of colonial and contemporary translation, emergency, and migration. The Zarabanda Variations was commissioned and produced by the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) with additional support from YellowBarn Music Festival, YoungARTS, Clark Art Institute, Frequency Festival, the Peabody Essex Museum, and Lincoln Center.

The Zarabanda Variations features Mariana Flores Bucio (voice), Wilfrido Terrazas (flutes, composition), Jonny Allen (percussion), Miranda Cuckson (violin), Carrie Frey (viola), Keir GoGwilt (violin / composition), Alec Goldfarb (guitars), Kyle Motl (contrabass), Coleman Itzkoff (cello), Vicente Atria (composition), and Edgar Garcia (poetry).

// This performance is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation.

// This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.

‍About Edgar Garcia
Edgar Garcia is an acclaimed poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He was born in California to a family of Central American extraction. He earned an associate degree from Chaffey Community College, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Yale University. He is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. He also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing, where he serves as director of Undergraduate Studies.

Garcia's collection of poems and anthropological essays, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, won the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award. He is also the author of the chapbook Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012) and the coeditor of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2017), as well as a collaborator on Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021). His other books include a scholarly monograph, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and a collection of essays, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His poems and translations have appeared in the Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fence, Jacket2, Mandorla, Portable Gray, and the anthology The Alteration of Silence: Recent Chilean Poetry (Diálogos, 2013); and his essays on poetry and related topics have appeared in American Religion, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE, Modern Philology, New Writing, PMLA, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, he was the guest editor in chief of Fence magazine.

About Keir GoGwilt
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist and composer whose work combines historical & musicological research with collaborative experimentation. As a violinist, he is known as a "formidable performer" (The New York Times) with an "evocative sound" (London Jazz News) and "finger-busting virtuosity" (San Diego Union Tribune). He has soloed with groups including the Basel Sinfonieorchester, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. As a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), he has performed original, collaboratively-devised music, dance, and theater works at The 92nd Street Y, Luminato Festival, PS 122 COIL, Stanford Live, the American Repertory Theater, Carolina Performing Arts, the Momentary, and the Ojai Music Festival. This past season he has been composer-in-residence with the JACK Quartet and has received commissions from the Barlow Foundation and the Copland House. His recompositions of renaissance and medieval music with violinist Johnny Chang have been released on Another Timbre; his improvising duo with bassist Kyle Motl has been acclaimed for their "rhapsodic gestures" (The New Yorker) and "keen musical intellects" (The Wire). He has worked closely with a broad range of artists including Matthew Aucoin, Bobbi Jene Smith, Mark Dresser, Eyvind Kang, Tan Dun, Steve Schick, and George Lewis. GoGwilt earned his PhD in Music (Integrative Studies) from UC San Diego in 2021, where he received the Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal for the Division of Arts & Humanities. His musicological research has been published in the Bach Journal, Current Musicology, Naxos Musicology, and the Orpheus Institute Series.