Alex Shaw
Tell us about you and your work
My life began as an intercultural being, born in the U.S. to an immigrant mother from Hong Kong, and a white father born and raised in central Florida. From an early age, I learned from both the challenges and benefits of navigating multiple cultural spaces and families and from the confusion and awe of traveling internationally. I believe my lived experiences have also laid the groundwork for my artistic pathways that bridge different cultural contexts and spaces. Interculturality is the commitment to cultural knowledge and integrity of practice, and the ability to engage in the multiplicities of this embodied knowledge and complex modalities of communication. It is also the capacity to acknowledge one’s own positionality in various systems of power and to recognize the responsibilities that come with privilege in order to work towards equity of resources and opportunities.
My work as an artist has evolved over the past two decades into several intertwining modalities as a musician, sound artist, composer, arts educator, and cultural producer. My first musical studies were in Western classical piano and percussion, yet my focus soon shifted to Afro-Cuban and Brazilian/Afro-Brazilian percussion traditions. During graduate school, my studies included other global percussion traditions, including Ewe drumming of southern Ghana, north Indian tabla, and Middle Eastern frame drum techniques. I have performed and recorded with two large ensembles for over 15 years - Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra and Alô Brasil. Founded in the early 1990s, Spoken Hand united hand percussionists from various cultural traditions – Afro-Cuban batá, north Indian tabla, West African djembe, and Brazilian percussion. Our collaborative compositional process was rooted in bridging the traditional techniques, rhythmic structures, sonorities, and repertoires of each section. Concurrently, I’ve been the long-time director of a 12+ piece band, Alô Brasil, composing, arranging, and performing various genres of Brazilian popular and folkloric music while educating audiences on complexities of Brazil’s cultural histories. As a dance accompanist, I have built long-lasting relationships with teachers and artists in modern and neo-traditional West African dance through classes and ensembles in college and university settings. This work has directly influenced my continued practice as an interdisciplinary collaborator.
As a sound artist/composer who values collaboration and layered contexts, I merge field recordings, audio archives, narrative text, acoustic percussion, and digital effects to create vibrant, immersive soundscapes with dynamic rhythmic textures. Some of my first compositions were commissioned by dance companies such as Brownbody and Lela Aisha Jones|FlyGround. Expanding upon this practice, I collaborated with the artist collective Las Gallas in 2012 to create Illuminate Me, a multi-sensory exhibition highlighting the shared stories and struggles of immigration and migration within Asian and Latinx communities. In 2016, I produced The Mandinga Experiment, my tribute to the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira Angola and its resilient, anti-racist legacy of cultural resistance, featuring live vintage visuals, musicians, dancers, and capoeiristas. From 2017-2019, I was the co-director for Modupúe | Ibaye: The Philadelphia Yoruba Performance Project, an intensive 2+ year community-based project that directly engaged more than 100 Yoruba-rooted community members in Philly. Most recently I collaborated with Lela Aisha Jones, Luke Carlos O'Reilly, and Aidan Un to create Revivals of Blackness, a multimedia performance/film that interweaves music, dance, poetry, interviews, and visuals to illustrate the collective lived experiences of diasporic Blackness, centering and challenging the ways we think about how Blackness intersects with ancestry, archive, ritual, and tradition.
My work as an arts educator is focused on cultural understanding and community building grounded in Afro-Brazilian drumming, Capoeira Angola, and collaborative compositional approaches. I have worked closely with many organizations to develop and implement arts education programs, including facilitating arts integration curriculum development in public schools and professional development for school district teachers. Furthermore, I have developed music education and interactive performances for youth incarcerated in juvenile justice centers and for communities of people living with dementia and disabilities. Recently, it has been my honor to work with Native Hawaiian youth as a guest teaching artist for Lili'uokalani Trust's ʻŌlino Arts Youth Summer Arts Program.
As a cultural producer, I worked as Curator/Artistic Director for Intercultural Journeys from 2014-2020, curating five seasons of performance & dialogue programs to feature BIPOC artists who promote intercultural understanding and social consciousness through their creative practice. Over the past twenty years I have also independently produced numerous Afro-Brazilian drum and dance workshops, film screenings, and performance and education events for artists and ensembles such as Balé Folclórico da Bahia, Ilê Aiyê, and Pandeiro Repique Duo, and have led student/study groups through multi-city tours in Brazil. In 2016, I conceived and produced a 3-day symposium at Swarthmore College titled Consciência Negra: A Legacy of Black Consciousness in Brazil, gathering scholars and artists focused on themes of race, identity, and Black consciousness in Brazil.
What inspires you?
My artistic, curatorial, and pedagogical practices are inspired and informed by seasoned cultural systems and lineages of rhythm, time, and song, and by ever-shifting soundscapes emerging from natural environments and ecosystems. I'm inspired when performing for live audiences who are there to be wholly present in the moment we are sharing. I'm inspired when I can facilitate and/or witness the transformative power of drumming and dancing together, be it in the classroom or in the streets, particularly as a tool for social change. I'm inspired by meaningful conversations with people who care about my well-being. I'm also inspired when in the presence of any artist who has developed a mastery of their creative expression, including my parents, my wife, and many of my teachers.
What does community mean to you?
I think community is an active state of being with others, not just a physical location or gathering of bodies. I believe community is about equitable exchange, reciprocity, shared values and mutual respect. Our relationships with communities also change over time as we gain more lived experiences. Though we may not always have a choice about which communities we are a part of, we should be considering how we can each leverage our assets to support and uplift the communities that have shaped the best parts of who we are today.
Favorite film
Admittedly, I don't have a favorite film, but the documentary Rhythmic Uprising (2010) continues to resonate with me in so many ways. Directed by Benjamin Watkins and produced by Eliciana Nascimento, this film shows how vibrant Afro-Brazilian performing arts and cultural traditions (Capoeira Angola, blocos afros, theater, and circus) are used to fight racism, social exclusion, and poverty in Bahia, Brazil.
Favorite song
This is an impossible question for me, of course, but I would have to say that I am completely transported every time I listen to Sergei Rachmaninov's Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 19, particularly the 3rd movement (Andante). There is a timelessness to this music, and I absolutely love the way the cello longingly and soulfully sings, stretches, and cries in the embrace of the piano throughout this piece.
Favorite place
A place where I can breathe fully and deeply; where I can recognize the joy and awe of being alive in that place in that particular moment, whether I'm surrounded by family love, ancient trees, clear waters, or glowing skies...
Photo by: Mark Stehle Photography