Some events burn through a place. Others continue burning quietly inside the people who lived through them. Multimedia artist Merlin Coleman has made a work that listens to both. Her new work, DISPATCHES from the CHARCOAL FOREST, opens May 1 in the East Bay.
Part choral performance, part sound installation, part reckoning, the piece draws from interviews with cleanup workers, survivors, dispatch audio and others touched by the Tubbs Fire, which raged through Santa Rosa in 2017. Presented in the round, with singers moving through the audience, it surrounds listeners in voices, fragments, rhythms and raw emotion.
Coleman, who lives in Sonoma County and grew up here, said the project began simply enough—with a need to face what happened.
“I wanted to make a piece about fires,” she said in a recent interview on The Drive 95.5 FM. “That just felt like a really important subject to all of our hearts, obviously.”
From there, the work grew organically, as many of her projects do. She began listening, gathering stories, and one of the most affecting came by chance.
She met a man working on a road crew near her home. They struck up a conversation. He mentioned that after the 2017 fire, he had served on a cleanup crew.
That chance encounter became “Purple Heart,” one of the project’s centerpiece sections. In it, the worker recounts arriving at a leveled home in Fountain Grove, where the owner asked if he might look for a lost military medal in the ashes.
“There’s nothing, right? Zero,” Coleman said. “And he’s like, well maybe it’s over here. And the worker goes and finds it.”
It’s the sort of story that reveals how disasters are experienced not only through parsing the catastrophe they bring, but through tiny recoveries: an object, a gesture, the proof that something endured.
Coleman’s method is unusual and deeply musical. She takes spoken interviews and listens for their hidden tonalities—the cadence, syntax and melody already embedded in everyday speech. Then she builds compositions around them, layering her own voice or, in this production, a live vocal ensemble.
“The whole syntax and the musicality and the rhythm of his voice really—if you start listening and breaking down any human speech and looping it, you’ll start to hear melodies,” she said. “You only have to loop it three, four, five times.”
The upcoming staging takes what was once multitracked by Coleman herself to the stage with live singers who had to learn intricate cues and precisely timed elements built around spoken narration—a process that required “a lot of real precision,” Coleman noted.
Yet technical rigor is only half the challenge. The material itself is emotionally volatile. Another major section of the piece centers on a man who lost his parents in the Tubbs Fire. Coleman spoke candidly about the responsibility of shaping real grief into art.
“I take a great responsibility in illustrating these stories and in what I hope is an appropriate way,” she said. That meant making choices about restraint as much as intensity. She deliberately avoided using literal sirens in the work, for example.
“That seemed too literal,” she explained. “Too triggering.”
Instead, she created vocal sounds that evoke the “sirens” of Greek mythology. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.
“My intention is for DISPATCHES to be a contribution to a collective healing,” she said. “I hope that this performance will create a space that can ultimately help people process these events.”
Merlin Coleman’s ‘DISPATCHES from the CHARCOAL FOREST’ will be performed at 8pm, May 1 & 2, at Dresher Ensemble Studio, 2201 Poplar St., Oakland (where Coleman shares the bill with Amy X Neuburg), and May 8 & 9 at Milkbar, 241A South 1st St., Richmond. For tickets and more information, visit merlinman.com.
