Portara Ensemble Presents: Dangerous, Part 2
el SUEÑO americano

SUnday, May 3, 2026

Jason Shelton, Artistic Director
Patrick Dunnevant, Assistant Director
Micah Snow, Accompanist

At the height of the pandemic, we learned that singing was one of the most dangerous things we could do. In the first Dangerous concert (2023), we played with that idea by exploring the role of singing in movements for social change. It turns out that singing has always been dangerous. Singing can inspire us to become the people we have always claimed to be.

For Dangerous, Part 2, we are partnering with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) to share stories and songs of people from diverse backgrounds who all have something in common - the American dream. We know that, for many, yesterday’s dream has become today’s nightmare, as compassion and welcome have given way to fear and scapegoating. TIRRC believes that a better world is possible – one where all our families, neighbors, and communities have opportunities to thrive, regardless of nationality, immigration status, or racial identity.

This evening we celebrate our shared humanity and join in the work to build a Tennessee where all belong. And maybe find some dangerous in you, too?

Program

Si Somos Americanos
Rolando Alarcón Soto; arr. Alejandro Pino G.

Welcome
Jason Shelton, Artistic Director

Home, part 1
Warsan Shire; read by Ciona Rouse
Click the title to learn more about this piece and its author

Immigrant Son
Words & Music: Estanislau Noguiera Gubiotti

Wide American Earth
Words: Aileen Cassinetto & Carlos Bulosan; Music: Saunder Choi

Home, part 2

Until All of Us Are Free
Words: Emma Lazarus; Music: Mark Burrows

Refugee
Words & Music: Moira Smiley
Solo: Beth Hampton

De Colores
Spanish/Mexican Folk Song; arr. Vicente Chavarria

Conducted by Patrick Dunnevant

Welcome from TIRRC
Miranda Arstakaitis

Home, part 3

The Wanderer
Words: Anonymous, translated by Alice Stone Blackwell; Music: Alex Wakim

she took his hands
Words: Emma Lozano; Music: Nicholas Cline
Solo: Emily Ritter

Border
Words & Music: Rich Campbell

Home, part 4

Ellis Island
Words & Music: Liam O’Neill; arr. Jason Shelton
Solos: Alana Griffith, Molly Lins, Amy Darrow, Josh Post

America Will Be
Words: Langston Hughes & Emma Lazarus; Music: Joel Thompson
Solos: Mary Scheib, Lea Maitlen

Closing & Invitation

Sanctuary
Words & Music: Jason Robert Brown

Program Notes

Si Somos Americanos
Words & Music: Rolando Alarcón Soto; arr. Alejandro Pino G.

Rolando Alarcón Soto (August 5, 1929 – February 4, 1973) was a Chilean singer-songwriter and teacher, and was one of the main figures of the movement Nueva canción chilena. He was the artistic director of Cuncumén, one of the most important Chilean folk groups in the 20th century. During the 1970s, Rolando was a political activist for the Popular Unity party of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Long before Bad Bunny’s spectacular halftime show, Alarcón imagined a broad and inclusive definition of what it meant to be an “American” in his 1966 hit Si Somos Americanos.

Immigrant Son
Words & Music: Estanislau Nogueira Gubiotti

Estanislau Nogueira Gubiotti (Stan) was born in São Paulo, Brazil (1962).  He began his violin studies with private teachers and later enrolled at the Carlos Gomez Conservatory of Music in São Paulo. Mr. Gubiotti came to Canada and earned two Music Major degrees in Winnipeg, MB. In addition to being a violinist, Estanislau is a mandolin player, singer, and classical guitarist, teaching and free-lancing in chamber, and symphony capacities. Mr. Gubiotti has participated in numerous recordings and traveled extensively in North America, Europe and Brazil, utilizing his numerous musical abilities. He lives in Abbotsford, B.C. with his wife and three children.

I am an immigrant son
finding my way so far from home.
Without a friend to call my own –
I am free – but I feel alone.
All our belongings left behind
where is the joy we came to find?
What is a boy supposed to do?
waiting for morning to break through.

I am an immigrant son
striving to live a better life.
Still there is sadness in my heart
for those I love and left behind.

I am an immigrant son
learning a language not my own,
finding it hard to understand and be understood.
Each day my parents work so hard,
giving me everything they have;
teaching me honour and respect.
Someday my children will believe
it is a treasure to be free.

Wide American Earth
Words: Aileen Cassinetto, after Carlos Bulosan; Music: Saunder Choi

Notes from the composer: I first came across Carlos Bulosan’s works while researching Filipino-American narratives. I learned that he was one of the first Filipino immigrants in America, having moved here in the 1930s. He was a labor activist, a union organizer, a novelist, essayist, and possibly wrote one of the earliest published works about immigrating to America. He is most famous for his autobiographical work, America is in the Heart, and his essay on the Rockwell painting The Freedom from Want. In 2013, his poem I Want the Wide American Earth became the centerpiece for an exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History celebrating the rich, diverse, and important contributions of Asian-Pacific Americans. Immigrant rights and reform persist as a common theme in Bulosan’s writing.

At the core of Wide American Earth is the immigrant’s fight for belonging and inclusion in the expansive, multitudinous space that is America. Bulosan paints a rich imagery of what this yearning was like in the middle of the 20th century. I commissioned Aileen Cassinetto to offer a present-day perspective of the ambition and longing held deep in the hearts of immigrants. Aileen is a poet laureate of San Mateo county and, like myself, an immigrant – a Filipino-American based in California.

In my mouth is a country of longing
The bittersweet of border crossings
Some words don’t come easy—scarce, scars
English is a language of leaving
a lexicon of who invaded
and what they left behind
I taste what passes for shrimp paste
I crave spice, some sharpness and haste
I chased a life around shifts and routes
First train leaves before first light
Last train comes before midnight
Transport me with the sight of filtered light
In my mouth is a country of bittersweet crossings
The only space I will ever occupy
is this expanse of longing

Click here for the original text by Carlos Bulosan

Until All of Us Are Free
Words: Emma Lazarus; Music: Mark Burrows

Poet Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) is best known for her words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty (coming later in this program!). Until All of Us Are Free sets another well-known quote from Lazarus, adapted from a text in An Epistle to the Hebrews (1882-1883) - a series of 15 open letters prompted by the violent pogroms in the Russian Empire and the subsequent influx of refugees, challenging American Jews to support their brethren.

We who are prosperous and independent have not sufficient homogeneity to champion on the ground of a common creed, common stock, a common history, a common heritage of misfortune, the rights of the lowest and poorest Jew-peddler who flees, for life and liberty of thought, from Slavonic mobs. Until we are all free, we are none of us free. But lest we should justify the taunts of our opponents, lest we should become "tribal" and narrow and Judaic rather than humane and cosmopolitan like the anti-Semites of Germany and Jew-baiters of Russia, we ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes - until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips.

Refugee
Words & Music: Moira Smiley

Singer, composer, and song-collector Moira Smiley has sung in arenas, cathedrals, kitchens, back porches, sound stages, and on glaciers. She’s performed with the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Tune-Yards, Tim O’Brien, Eric Whitacre, Los Angeles Master Chorale, New World Symphony, Solas, and The Lyris String Quartet. Moira’s original compositions, choral arrangements, and folk music are being sung by millions of voices around the world today.

Notes from the composer: Refugee is about feeling bereft and misunderstood, and inviting empathy. My world was blown open in summer 2016 while volunteering at Calais Jungle refugee camp in France. I woke to culture and language completely beyond my understanding, and also the simple power of humans making beauty together – from nothing. It’s an honor to be with people when the have a life-or-death need for ‘perspective’ - that perspective mostly gotten through tenacity, openness, and wit. Through these people who had become refugees, I understood how deeply connected we billions of humans are, and how little we may know of each other.

Refugee
In your world I’m a refugee
In your world danger all around me, all around me, all around me
In your world I’m not free, I must flee, I must flee

Bring me shelter, I will not harm you
Bring me shelter, please
Bring me shelter, I will not harm you
I would shelter you

I am only what you are.
Imagine your unbreakable world was broken, No more rules to protect you

Who was I?
In my world I was standing strong
In my world my heart did belong
And now it’s gone – there is only longing, only longing, only longing

De Colores
Spanish/Mexican Folk Song; arr. Vicente Chavarria

This simple and unpretentious folk song goes back several hundred years. The tune is reminiscent of Spanish folk songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it is unknown exactly when it crossed the Atlantic. By the twentieth century, it was one of the most well-known Mexican folk songs around the world. Perhaps most famously in the US, it became the unofficial anthem of the United Farm Workers movement in the 1950s and '60s. The text appears easy enough for a child to learn, yet in truth it is an appreciation of the beauty of the earth and the simple things in life that unite us all as one humanity. This arrangement was commissioned by Joshua Habermann and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale in the spring of 2012 for the celebration of the Centenary of Statehood of New Mexico.

The Wanderer
Words: Anonymous, translated by Alice Stone Blackwell; Music: Alex Wakim

Notes from the composer: Rage is a complex feeling to calculate: when one is displaced from their home, whether by force, nature, or other reasons, there’s no doubt that a wash of emotions overtake them. However, rage often must subside until survival can be achieved, but soon, those emotions return and we rarely understand them.

The Wanderer uses poetry from the Armenian Genocide, oscillating between pure rage, fear, and confusion. The worst curse to call upon a man, “to be a wanderer from his native land,” spoken by a wanderer. It is a sad cycle that we see in our human story.

The piece takes place after the displacement, and serves as a sort of reckoning. I hope that this text can arouse empathy and understanding, to minimize needless wanderings and sufferings.

Oh, heavy hearted is the wanderer
In foreign lands, who hath his country left!
In gazing on the fever of his heart,
Even the rocks with sorrow would be cleft.

When you on any man would call a curse,
Say, “Be a wanderer from your native land!
And may your pillow be the mountain side,
And may you sleep at night upon the sand!”

- from Armenian Poems: Rendered Into English Verse
Translation by Alice Stone Blackwell (1917)

she took his hands
Words: Emma Lozano; Music: Nicholas Cline

Nicholas Cline (b. 1985) says “I make music for voices, acoustic instruments, and by electroacoustic means. Deeply influenced by the natural world, my music draws on a broad range of subjects and experiences with the belief that music reveals, challenges, and shapes the listener’s understanding of the world.”

She took Saulito’s hands and said to him very calmly,
“They can’t hurt us. God is protecting us. You just have to have faith
and I will be fine and with you soon.”

Words of Emma Lozano, on the arrest of Chicago activist Elvira Arellano,
quoted in the The Washington Post, August 21, 2007.

Border
Words & Music: Rich Campbell

Notes from the composer: Border is an artistic response to the immigration crisis around the globe (especially in the United States). The text draws from (and paraphrases) several sources: contemporary media, Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” the Bible’s Matthew 25:31-40, currency, and others. Border is a call for justice, empathy, and compassion - a summons to our collective conscience.

Border, sanctuary
Border, asylum
Bridges not walls
Cry

Border, sanctuary
Border, asylum
Bridges not walls
Cry, cry, crisis
Cry, cry freedom

Mother, father, sister, brother
e pluribus unum

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat
I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink
I was a stranger, you invited me in

Indivisible, with Liberty
Indivisible, with Justice
Indivisible, with Liberty
e pluribus unum

We are your poor, we are your tired
We are yearning, we are yearning to be free
Poor, tired, yearning to be free
e pluribus unum

Border, sanctuary
Border, asylum
Children hungry, children thirsty
Mother, father, sister, brother
Come

Border, sanctuary
Border, asylum
Bridges not walls
Humanity
Border, Cry, cry, crisis,
Cry, cry freedom
Border
Border
Bridges not walls

Ellis Island
Words & Music: Liam O’Neill; arr. Jason Shelton

As we prepared for this concert, our singers shared immigration and refugee stories from their own histories. Many of us are only a generation or two away from those stories. My grandmother came through Ellis Island from Italy as a young girl, and my grandfather was first generation American born to a Dutch mother and an Irish father, both of whom also came through those storied walls as children. It was a place of hope and new starts, but also a place of incredible grief and loss.

Ellis Island was released by Irish artist Elle Marie O’Dwyer in 2017. The song conveys the struggles of emigration, of a young couple searching for a new life in the promised land during troubled times in Ireland. Tragedy strikes and their story does not turn out as planned.

Well she waved him goodbye
As the ship left the harbor
Crossing the Atlantic
To Amerikay 

And three months he waited
For her to come over
And she wrote him a letter
And this she did say:

Oh I’ll see you, my love
When we reach Ellis Island
Where my ship sails from Ireland
On this very day

Bound for the land
Of hope and of glory
And we’ll start a new life
In that land far away

But their dream, it was broken
For somewhere out on the ocean
She caught a fever
And it laid her low 

And with the winter winds wailing
As the tall ship was sailing
They laid her to rest
In the water below

Oh I’ll see you, my love…

Now sometimes at night
He goes down to the harbor
And stands on the pier
Looking out to the sea 

And he dreams of his true love
Out there on the ocean
And the hopes and the dreams
That were never to be

Oh I’ll see you, my love…

America Will Be
Words: Langston Hughes & Emma Lazarus (and students from Freedom High School); Music: Joel Thompson

Joel Thompson is a composer, conductor, pianist and educator whose works aim to prioritize community and facilitate connection, while creating music that is “alive and inquisitive, in constant dialogue” (Arts ATL) and “one of the most attractive things one has heard” (New York Classical Review). His work is both powerful and incisive in centering the concerns and desires of the voiceless and historically marginalized. Thompson was born in the Bahamas to Jamaican parents before the family moved to Atlanta. Thompson is currently based in Houston for his composer-in-residence post with Houston Grand Opera. 

Notes from the composer: When I was a young child, I imagined that America was like living on Sesame Street in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—a utopic land of opportunity and freedom. When I finally arrived at age ten, my dreams had mostly come true, but I also learned a somber lesson that not all principles are easy to put into practice. It was that friction between professed ideals and painful reality that Langston Hughes captured in his poem, “Let America Be America Again.” That friction is also the foundation of the piece commissioned by Shannon Lyles and the FHS Patriot Singers in Orlando, Florida. Freedom High School serves such a diverse community of immigrants that eleven languages were represented in Ms. Lyles’ top choir. As hateful and xenophobic rhetoric became prominent in national discourse, we worked together to capture the essence of the choir’s ethnic diversity and artistic unity. Emma Lazarus’ words, which are engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, are a perfect foil to Hughes’ dark (but ultimately hopeful) sentiments. To add a personal touch to the piece, I also asked the members of the choir to complete three prompts—I hope…/I dream…/I sing...—which they would then translate and record so that I could get a sense of the rhythm of their respective languages. In the end, the piece aims to make plain how far we are from the ideals we’ve set for ourselves, but it also clings to the hope that we will one day achieve them. I can’t think of anything more American than that.

Who are you that mumbles in the dark
and who are you that draws your veil across the stars? [...]
I’m the one who dreamt a dream while still a serf of kings
A dream so strong, so brave, so true that even yet it sings.
To build a homeland of the free. [...]
For all the songs we’ve sung, and all the dreams we’ve dreamed,
America was never America to me,
and yet I swear: America will be!

Adapted from Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these to me!
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Adapted from Emma Lazarus’ The New Colossus

Sanctuary
Words & Music: Jason Robert Brown

Best known for his work on Broadway, composer Jason Robert Brown created this rumination on migration which holds a special significance in a time filled with crises like immigration, family separation and a global pandemic.

That's a siren
There's an ambulance down in the street
Shut the window
Close the curtain, the lights are blinding

I can't hear with the children crying
I can't think with the anger flying
I can't breathe with my mentors dying

And I, I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am writing your name in the air
Can you see me?
Can you see me?
I am writing for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?

You've been waiting
I can tell from your steps in the hall
You've been silent
Keeping watch as the world's unwinding

You are standing in isolation
You have shut down communication
You are leading your own migration

And I, I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am stretching my arms to the sky
Can you reach me?
Can you reach me?
I am reaching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?

If you'll be my walls
If you'll be my roof
If you'll keep me safe
I will give you music

I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am searching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?
I am lost at the end of the world
Can you find me?
Can you find me?
I am reaching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Will you shelter me?

I am reaching for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Shelter me
I am praying for sanctuary
Will you shelter me?
Shelter me
I am here, I am here, I am here
Will you shelter me?