"A Call for Justice" was a pop-up multimodal performance installation sharing the audio documentation of felt experiences of racism in the United States by way of an Oral history Soundscape performed to by 10 dancers. Throughout the performance we provided headsets along with a printed 40-page zine to be able to listen, read, and become intimate with the narratives shared in the performance's soundscape. The intent of this production was to cultivate an immersive experience to generate ongoing collective dialogue regarding the social injustices omnipresent throughout the United States since it's inception. Our performance was in hopes that such dialogue would transpire community action, connection, and listening in order to pursposefully engage in necessary behavior toward the critical changes need at this moment in our times.

On October 9th, 2021 in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, New York—after one year and four months of story collecting, editing, organzing, and rehearsing— The CSCProject's pop-up Oral History Performance Installation “A Call for Justice” went live! From 1:30pm- 3:00pm EDT we presented our company's dance performance to a 20-minute narrative-based soundscape that involved a collection of 27 personal stories expressing intimate experiences with systemic injustice within the United States. Our performance included nine professional dancers, eight of which were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). We had the opportunity to run our performance twice; once at 1:45pm EDT and the second at 2:30pm EDT. Over the course of the day our soundscape installation reached a total of 150 to 200 people, whether those were individuals who had stopped by the exhibit momentarily or stayed for the entire show.

At the show we had two tables with 150 "silent disco" type headsets available —donated to us by @quitehoursNY— that were being distributed to audience members interested in listening to the Oral History soundscape more intimately, or to the narratives independent from the two live performances. Each headset had three channels: one for the original soundscape and the other two for the full unedited stories. We also had a table set up that showcased 200 of our "A Call for Justice" Zine publications. In between each of the performances, the dancers were distributing the Zines throughout the park to invite pedestrians to come see our show, as well as to hopefully elicit more participating bodies into the dialogue about systemic injustice, inclusion, and equity.

We had four directors on site, two helpers at the "Zine booth" that also helped in distributing our Zine, three people handing out the headsets, one musician, one extra stage hand, and nine dancers. Although at first glance it appeared we only had 20 people apart of our show, we in fact had over 70 collaborators in making the exhibition come to full fruition. Our full team included 19 visual artists who contributed to the Zine, 27 storytellers whose stories made up the soundscape, two additional directors not on site, two printing presses, one social worker, one intern, one audio engineer, and one videographer. We also have to say a BIG thank you to @judsonchurchnyc for the sound equipment, to @materialsforthearts for the three white erase boards, and of course AGAIN to @NYCulture for providing us with the $5,000.00 grant!

When someone comes up to you and says “your show reminded me of what I love about NYC”- it makes us feel like we did something right.