• 6:15 – 6:30 pm - Arrival
• 6:30 – 7:00 pm - Roundtable: Rocío Ferreira, DePaul U, Jorge Coronado, Northwestern U, Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, Indiana U
• 7:10 – 7:50 pm - Musical performance
• 8:00 pm - Reception

Alejandra Cárdenas, or Ale Hop, and Laura Robles grew up houses apart in Lima, Peru, without ever meeting each other; now, the two musicians, currently based in Berlin, are presenting --Agua Dulce--, their first release together, named after their childhood beach. Their work together, both on record and live, is a radical deconstruction of the traditional rhythms of the Peruvian coast. From its birth, the cajón was a symbol of resistance, experimentation and transformation. Robles and Cárdenas strived to maintain the instrument’s spirit and qualities by pushing the boundaries of its sound into the future. The two musicians’ performance lies on a foundation informed by decolonialism and organology; they make the cajón, a percussion instrument that the African slaves created from wooden fruit boxes, their joint work’s nucleus. The duo’s mission isn’t merely capturing something sonically futuristic but is primarily concerned with shaking off the dust:  These rhythms have become ossified nowadays, heard in Peruvian folklore shows and on the ‘global music’ circuit, but our desire is to experiment and do something more radical with them, connecting to the instrument’s more radical past, comments Cárdenas.  Nothing short of amazing.