Performance: Keep Their Heads Ringin’

Join us for a participatory procession and sound performance by exhibiting artist Michelle Lopez + collaborator Austin Fisher.

Through live and recorded sound, Keep Their Heads Ringin’ is a performance that takes on the complicated symbolism of the Liberty Bell as an emblem of freedom and equality, which is also marked with failure: the bell’s famed crack that rendered the iconic hunk of cast-iron broken and silent at its arrival. Or in the case of a campus belltower, echoes of Kent State and other acts of real or virtual violence set upon on campus freedoms.

First developed in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd uprising, Keep Their Heads Ringin’ was a physical and sonic intervention onto the actual Liberty Bell near Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The performance challenged the skewed historical narrative of American freedom, at a moment of heightened xenophobia, racism, and division. Lopez uses the clanging beat of the ringing bell to structure a somber march that slowly but powerfully rings the reality of the current American climate. Reconsidered for Tufts University and its belltower in Goddard Chapel in 2026, the sound performance and participatory procession invite visitors to move though campus together under a collaged soundtrack and newly composed score by sound artist Austin Fisher, asking us truly what freedom means.

This program begins in the Aidekman Arts Center in the Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt exhibition. Together, the group will take a fully accessible 20-minute uphill walk to Goddard Chapel culminating in a live carillon performance.

Following the performance, TUAG’s Student Programming Committee will be hosting a poster making workshop in the nearby Curtis Hall (474 Boston Avenue) for participants to use in the Saturday March 28th No Kings March in Boston. A group of staff and students will be taking the Green Line, just across the street from Curtis Hall, to Boston Common at 11:30am.

Borrowing the title and melody of Dr. Dre’s 1995 anthem, Keep Their Heads Ringin’ blends a carillon score for Goddard Chapel’s belltower, which stands 100-feet high at the hilltop of Tufts’ Medford / Somerville campus, with a composition of sampled songs that reference and evoke the “ding-dong” of bells. Lopez pulls on the methodologies of a walking tour, a protest of collective marching and handmade signs—from Black Lives Matter to anti-ICE preventions—as a form of choreography with the sound piece to create a sculptural space of protest, contemplation, and visibility for those unable to participate and made invisible by the state. With individuals’ cell phones and handheld blue tooth speakers, participants will collectively ring the fractured liberty bell in a resonant new way.

Learn more at https://www.nokings.org/. Please note that Keep Their Heads Ringin' is not affiliated with the national organization No Kings.