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“Measure the Silence”, a new album by Peninsula musicians Alex and Maya Valdivia, explores themes of emotional distance and restraint, but the concert marking its release aims to offer the opposite, with a unique way for listeners to connect, and not only through music. It’s an event that’s also an artistic collaboration with the community.
The March 13 show at Little Green a Plant Bar in Redwood City is part of a joint project with Peninsula-based Fuse Theatre in which community members created works of art — masks — inspired by the album’s songs.
San Mateo-based musician Alex Valdivia and his daughter, Maya, wrote and recorded “Measure the Silence” together. They will perform all 14 of its tracks at the show, each with a corresponding mask on display.
“The idea behind the album is (about) all these things that we carry with us and we don’t share, and how we can reframe them and think about them differently, so that we can actually share that burden,” Alex Valdivia said. “You know, the metaphor is right there for the taking, right? Because when you don’t say the things that you should be saying, what you end up doing is like putting on a mask. So we took that very literally.”
Valdivia has been working with Fuse Theatre for about a decade, he said, writing music for some of the company’s shows and occasionally performing as well. He’s also part of Fuse Theatre’s Sparks group, an artists’ collective that plans plays, events and other performances.
“It’s very singer-songwriter, acoustic indie folk — some combination between folk and chamber, but the foundation is acoustic guitars and piano,” Valdivia said of his style. “I’ve been doing this project with my daughter Maya, who plays the piano. So it’s guitar, piano and harmonies — that’s kind of our thing. And every once in a while, we kind of branch out and bring the whole band, which is what’s happening (at the album release concert).
The concert will feature a seven-piece band, but Valdivia more typically performs solo or as a duo with 13-year-old Maya, which itself is a relatively new development. “Measure the Silence” marks the pair’s first official project.
Valdivia, who was born and raised in Cuba, said he was raised playing music and that it has always been a part of his life. His daughter is also growing up in a musical environment.
“Maya has been coming on stage with me for a while now. She also started learning piano when she was really, really small, and taking singing lessons. So every once in a while, I would invite her, and then she would do a little duet with me. But this is the first time that we’re actually doing something that we arranged together. We’ve been doing this for a year, working on this project,” he said.
The masks that will be featured at the concert were created in two community workshops held by Fuse Theatre in February.
“We’re using the masks as props, and kind of a statement on the themes of the album,” said Stacey Ardelean, Fuse Theatre’s artistic director.
The mask workshops also included some collaborative poem writing, she said, which will also be shared during the show.
“I created some of the masks for the album, and we used those as sort of a jumping-off point to talk about scenes around silence in our everyday life, and how those masks can feel heavy or locked-in or blocking our vision and that sort of thing. We used those masks to talk about the idea of a metaphor of a mask; what we hold on the outside and what we hold on the inside,” Ardelean said.
Workshop participants initially were given only the lyrics for the songs featured on “Measure the Silence,” and asked to begin creating their masks based on the words alone. They didn’t hear the accompanying music until a little later in the process. Both Valdivia and Ardelean noted the surprising shift in the art that came about once the participants heard the melodies.
“We read the lyrics as a poem, and I read it, so it was interesting for Alex and Maya to listen to it, and the words are just really heavy as a poem, but then they played it as a song, and the song just lifts it and gives it hope. It was just very interesting to us how different the music could make the lyrics,” Ardelean said.
After participants heard the music, Valdivia said, “Most of the time, they’d go back and tweak their original designs or even restart from a fresh perspective, which is kind of the whole point of the album.”
The March 13 concert won’t be the final outing for the masks. The art, and the community collaboration developed in the initial mask workshops, will serve as a foundation for further workshops aimed at creating a performance to be held later in the spring.
“We do collaborative poems, we do improv, we do movement, so we’re going to be taking all that music and the masks and all the work we’ve already done in those workshops, and we’ll invite people back, and we’ll invite people from the opening to come to those workshops in March and April, and then in May, we’ll be doing a performance, perhaps with community members if they want to perform, or it might be just our company members,” Ardelean said.
“Our shows are always pretty interactive anyway, so we’re not a typical theater company,” she said.
Alex and Maya Valdivia last month performed some songs from the new album in a concert at the Center for Creativity; see a video of the show here.
March 13, 8-10 p.m., at Little Green a Plant Bar, 1101 Main St., Redwood City; free (reservations requested); tinyurl.com/ValdiviaSilenceAlbum.
