We sat down with Kelsey and fellow Decomposed ensemble member, violist Seth Pei.

We met with the members of Silk Road that were going to be part of the performance.

They had sanctuary as their theme for their tour.

And we were thinking, OK, what does that look like for us at the land school, at our house, for the Black community, bringing sanctuary to the south side of Chicago? What we ended up with was this really beautiful exploration of different rooms, you could say, in a sanctuary, like a living space.

And it was a really beautiful mixture of the pieces and compositions that the Silk Road members had and Seth and my, our compositions that we had written and arranged.

It just was incredibly collaborative and it was a beautiful blending of both our identity as an ensemble and their identity too.

Decomposed has come up with their own ways of creating sanctuary in their community.

So many of our events are for the Black community, including the event that we did with Silk Road.