We Are The World

We Are the World emerged in Los Angeles’s Echo Park area toward the end of the 2000s as an audacious hybrid of dance, costume design, video, performance art, and brooding, rhythm-driven electronic sound. The project took root in the joint work of choreographer (“Sir”) Ryan Heffington and musician-producer Robbie Williamson, whose ideas first surfaced within Williamson’s monthly Fingered event, a hybrid performance series and dance party. Although the earliest presentations sometimes featured as many as fifteen performers, the configuration soon narrowed to a core quartet: Williamson handling production and live percussion, his spouse Megan Gold writing lyrics and fronting the vocals—both of whom had previously worked together as the band Work after meeting in Tacoma, Washington, in 1992—and Heffington devising costumes and movement in tandem with Nina McNeely, another Fingered collaborator and a dancer-filmmaker. Their fiercely stylized live spectacles draw on disparate cultural and visual references to probe political ideology, gender identity, and religious dogma, deploying such signature elements as burqas, stark black-and-white masks, and attire modeled on ninjas, guerrilla fighters, rural Chinese laborers, and French mimes. The resulting theatricality has provoked equal measures of bewilderment and fervor, cultivating an intensely loyal local audience. Away from the stage the group supplied songs to a pair of Manimal Vinyl tribute collections devoted to the Cure and David Bowie; the track “Clay Stones” surfaced in 2009 via I Am Sound, accompanied by a characteristically disorienting Alma Har’el video, and the self-titled debut album appeared on Manimal the following April.