STONO: An audio-ritual is an original composition exploring the 1739 Stono slave rebellion through the voices of its beyond-human participants. While typically depicted as a suppressed insurrection, this piece asks: Is there another story? To find answers, listeners are guided to commune with ancestors, water, mushrooms, guns, and the Kongolese Virgin Mary. Combining music, spoken text, and field recordings from the historic rebellion sites, STONO imagines a more expansive and surprising story about that fateful episode, a space in which revolution extends beyond racial politics, human temporality, and material space.
STONO is an interspecies inquiry into seemingly human events. The written record on the Stono rebellion is limited and inconsistent. This piece suggests we can more complexly explore this incident by listening to natural and supernatural witnesses, some of whom–like rocks–were present during the actual events. The piece speculates on how the surrounding world spoke to the rebels, offering a glimpse of how they might have heard their world. Instead of revealing “truth” in the story, STONO invites listeners to contemplate the manifold actions taken, motivations behind them, and resulting ramifications. Considering the beyond-human becomes a means to practice imagining the past beyond limits of human narrative and within grander scales of time. STONO also de-centers the human voice, encouraging participants to learn the languages of the natural world. Finally, STONO shares lesser-known stories of Black revolution. Presenting—and queering—this history challenges listeners to think beyond binaries of Black-White or slave-free and engage in more nuanced reflections on race and colonialism.
The backbone of STONO: An audio-ritual is a body of songs developed through ceremonial engagement with the beyond-human in rebellion sites and sung from their perspectives. These songs combine African diasporic folkloric forms (ring shout, bomba, rumba, batá), electronic and synthesized instruments, and field recordings of the more-than-human voices (raw audio, digitally processed, and transcribed onto other instruments). I wrote the music and lyrics, recorded my own vocals and instrumentals, and remote engineered sessions with additional musicians who appear in the piece.
STONO is informed by a multi-pronged research methodology. I analyzed the primary documents and secondary sources on the Stono rebellion, as well as conversed with several leading Stono scholars. With this foundation on the historical record of the event—and its gaps—I conducted participant-observation in multiple locations where the insurrection took place outside of Charleston, South Carolina. For this phase, I engaged in practices such as altar building, meditation, and drumming/singing to connect with the natural and supernatural inhabitants of these spaces. Finally, I collected numerous field recordings of the sounds in these sites.
Click here to view a PDF of the libretto
Written & composed by T. Carlis Roberts
Additional lyrics for “Ibo” by Kristen Mitchell
Performers:
T. Carlis Roberts - voice, synths, percussion, mandolin, guitar
Rafael Maya - drums, electronic percussion
Safiya Fredericks - voice
Kristen Mitchell - voice, hot water bottle
Presentation History
September 2022 — Slave Dwelling Project conference: The Stono Rebellion and the Atlantic World (Charleston, SC)
August 2022 — KGNU radio (Denver/Boulder, CO)
July 2022 — Destination Freedom podcast via the Broadway Podcast Network (online)
June 2022 — National Queer Arts Festival (online) — View program
Co-commissioned by No Credits Productions, LLC for Destination Freedom and Queer Cultural Center for the National Queer Arts Festival. A co-production of No Credits Productions, LLC and Queer Cultural Center.
