Rupture (2019, revised 2025)
for Kyma and iPad (running Kyma Control)
Immediately after the 2010 El Mayor Cucapah 7.2 magnitude earthquake in northern Mexico, seismologist Alejandro González Ortega and physicist/choreographer Minerva Muñoz visited the site to interview an eye-witness: Don Chayo, a Cucapa native who had witnessed the surface rupture. During the interview, Don Chayo revealed a story told to him by his grandmother about a disobedient child who used his harpoon to pierce the testicles of a snoring giant in the south, resulting in the creation of the Colorado River and the Gulf of California. Based on the landmarks identified in the story, the descriptions of low rumbling howls of the angry monster, and the description of water covering large parts of Baja California, Gonzalez recognized the story as metaphorical recounting of an earlier seismic event that had been passed down over several generations by Cucapa grandmothers.
Inspired by Don Chayo’s story and its similarities to the El Mayor Cucapah earthquake in 2010, Gonzalez and Muñoz began developing a dance performance piece; they enlisted the help of composer Carla Scaletti to map 3D seismological data collected by 12 measurement stations to sound and music for the piece.
However, as Muñez and González continued to conduct research and on-site interviews with the Cucapa elders, a more disturbing story began to emerge — that of a displaced people whose name, Cucapa, although it means “those who live on the cloudy river,” now live in a desert, their livelihood from fishing and their water rights becoming increasingly restricted.
What had originally been intended as a science/art collaboration about a seismic event evolved into a deeper metaphor for the concept of “rupture” — a story of displacement, disruption, and geopolitical borders. The result—Wí Shpá, A journey in bare feet — combines stories of Cucapa cosmogenesis and the scientific studies of the El Mayor-Cucapah 7.2 magnitude earthquake, weaving a network of collaboration, tradition, scientific research, knowledge, and experience, but above all, creating a dialog between scientists, artists, the native community, artistic collaborators, and the general public.
Rupture (a 15-minute distillation of the music and sound design from the 40-minute Wí Shpá work) explores the spatial information inherent in the dataset captured during the El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake, the geographic waypoints outlined in the Cucapa story, and the symbolic meanings of the four cardinal directions found throughout the Cucapa cosmogony.
In Rupture you hear 3D seismic data recorded during the event played directly as audio signals, interpreted as impulse responses, and as control signals for the parameters of synthesis and processing algorithms, entangled with hints of the northern border and elements of the Don Chayo’s story of a mischievous boy, the monster, the flood, and the numerous morphing birds, coyotes, and other magical animals that populate the Cucapa universe.