HA Harmonic: Graphic Score Performance

HA Harmonic is a site-responsive performance developed for We Still Here, presented in situ at the Equestrian Statue of General Philip Sheridan. Rooted in the true meaning of “HA” as life-force, the work centers breath as a generative and animating presence carried through lip-vibrated aerophones including animal horns, conch shells, brass instruments, and the human voice. Through respiration, vibration, and resonance, the performance speaks life into the space—affirming We Still Here as both declaration and continuation amid the historic decimation of prairie ecologies, peoples, animals, and cultural lifeways.

Prairie-informed graphic scores composed by Sadie Woods are interpreted and performed by Angel Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, and Corey Wilkes through layered conch calls, animal-horn sonorities, resonant brass, and vocalizations, generating an improvisational field of harmonic frequencies. Breath operates as conduit shaping a fluid sonic language informed by traditions of ceremony, memory work, and cultural expression.

The performance extends Henderson and Woods’s temporal public artwork We Still Here, composed of sacred American bison horns that center the bison as both ecological keystone and spiritual anchor within prairie landscapes. Installed around the monument plinth in direct dialogue with Sheridan’s role in westward expansion and military campaigns that contributed to the near-eradication of the American bison, the work reorients instruments historically associated with warfare into vessels for witness and resonance while celebrating processes of rewilding and ecological return. By invoking the resurgence of bison populations across the Great Plains, the work gestures toward land rematriation and renewed relationships among people, animals, and prairie environments, transforming the site into a living tuning field of sonic vibration.