“We Began from Silence”

Abstract

In the late 1970s, the Mexican ensemble Atrás del Cosmos, a pioneering free improvisation collective (1975–1983), held an eight-month residency at El Galeón, a city theater. Jazz and experimental theater were twin touchstones for the ensemble, which adapted ideas borrowed from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean expatriate known for his radical influence on the city’s 1960s theater scene, including the notion that theatrical performance should shatter social decorum and elicit liberating ways of being-in-the-world. For Atrás del Cosmos, art’s transformative potential also lay in articulating a personal voice in a collective context—a central tenet of jazz and African-American expressive culture. The ensemble’s multivalent genealogy, as well as its collaborations with US-based improvisers—notably trumpeter Don Cherry—bolster arguments for the transnational nature of twentieth-century “American” music. This chapter proposes Vijay Iyer’s notion of “embodied empathy” as a key to understanding the ensemble’s immediate social impact and its lasting historical significance.