Garcia

For mubone and movement. 2021. 10 minutes.

Garcia is the middle name of Jackie, who looked after Kalun in Hong Kong from the day he was born until he was four. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, she found him on Facebook after years of looking, and sent photos of a little kid he doesn't remember being. He moved to Canada at four with exactly one memory from that time.

So the piece is about filling in a memory with other people's help. The room becomes a kind of memory bank: trombone sounds get planted on the floor, at the horizon and up in the sky, and each place changes them in its own way. Bettina's choreography comes out of contact improvisation, so the trombone spends a lot of time on the floor, like an extra limb.