Our
Network

Sponsored by the CrossCurrents and Compton Foundations, the Arts and Activism (A&A) ColLABoration supports six projects between artists and activist organizations. Each project uses arts-integrated organizing to build power within their respective communities. Through storytelling and community engagement they produce narratives that elevate themes of democracy, power, and freedom in the United States. While the projects vary in model, practice, and development, they share similar goals: to achieve impact and to deepen engagement on salient issues by centering the voices of those who are most affected by them.

A&A ColLABoration intentionally selected projects at different stages of development to showcase what successful collaborations between artists and activists. As part of a national learning cohort, the projects contribute to a network where methods and strategies are discussed, documented, and shared.

The projects are:

The League is one of two startups supported by A&A ColLABoration. The League offers media/marketing strategies to musicians and media producers who want to elevate social issues on their platforms. Formed by a collective of creatives, analysts, and campaigners, The League experiments with cultural engagement strategies to reach new audiences through social media and curated events.

Similarly, the School of Good Citizenship is a new venture launched by the artists duo LigaronoReese. Inspired by the success of their previous public art installations Melted Away, the artists will mount four simultaneous public art projects in Charlotte, North Carolina in the week leading up to the Republican Convention. These installations will anchor workshops around democracy that blend creativity and art with civic dialogue.

Skylight Engagement will launch its first convening of filmmakers and activists in the United States, based on successful models of their work in Central and South America. The Borderlands Solidari Labs will gather a new network of artists and activists to examine immigration in the United States along the Southwest border. The group will collaboratively prototype media projects that tell nuanced stories about immigration challenging the prevailing dominant and demeaning narratives.

The Midwest Cultural Lab will deepen its model for connecting artists and activists in Ohio. Using social media platforms, artists in the network will create content that mobilize young voters of color around local and state level issues.

National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) will expand its media marketing campaign for its Families Belong Together: Coloring Without Borders children’s coloring book and accompanying curriculum. The coloring book is a result of NDWA’s partnership with numerous artists who donated their work for the pages of the book. The coloring book distribution will be done in two parts: first, to migrant children at the border to help them process their experiences. Second, to families in the U.S. whose purchases are an act of solidarity and support for NDWA’s work at the border.

Led by their Artist in Residence, Forward Together partners with artists of color and allied organizations to strengthen the effectiveness of movements and campaigns through the use of visual imagery. With A&A ColLABoration funding, Forward Together will expand the Art As Power program, with a specific focus on the fifth annual Transgender Day of Resilience as well as mobilizing artists in rapid response campaigns.

Alberto Puerto Music creates new classical and guitar music compositions and collaborates across disciplines in the Miami, FL area. Our latest project is a Latin American songbook recording album that crosses Latin American musical song forms with arrangements centered around the classical guitar.

Artist Corps CONNECTS New Orleans music education initiatives with local and national resources to build strong music programs with:

• EMPOWERED Educators
• EMBEDDED Artists and Culture Bearers
• EQUIPPED School Leaders
• ENGAGED Communities
• EXCELLENT Opportunities for Young People

 
Artist Corps:

AFFIRMS that music is young people’s birthright, innovation is New Orleans’ legacy, and investing in the next generation is our shared responsibility.

COMMITS to establishing pathways to excellent, comprehensive, sequential music education for every young person in New Orleans.

HONORS New Orleans educators, artists, and culture bearers – valuing their expertise and amplifying their voices in developing strategy for advancing music education.

CELEBRATES the many dedicated schools, programs, cultural organizations, families, funders, resource providers and supporters that provide music education in New Orleans – and strives to coordinate efforts and focus resources to increase collaborative impact.

CENTERS equity and justice in our work, cultivating systemic opportunity that enables young people to engage in their cultural legacy and grow as musicians and as individuals.

MODELS a reflective practice that respects tradition, integrates diverse perspectives, fosters growth and embraces change.

The Arts and Politics Collective consists of a small group of artists and scholars who ask: What is, or ought to be, the relationship between aesthetics and politics? To explore this question, we are creating a cycle of performance works that challenges normative ways of viewing the arts.

The three experimental plays explore music, dance, and the visual art. Each piece engages a canonical work of art: Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (1825), Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” (1891), and Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937). Each illuminates our own time. The works demonstrate how racial and cultural differences affect the arts. Our aim, in the words of Toni Morrison, is to make the work “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful.”

To learn more: artsandpoliticsplays.com

Rising Water is working to amplify the voices of regional communities threatened by rising sea levels through artistic expressions. Local artists have been commissioned to work with threatened communities to create new performance art reflective of the traditions, values, and beliefs that will be lost as rising seas swallow these communities. Through public performances of these works, Rising Water will creatively inform, challenge, and inspire the broader community to take positive action against sea level rise and climate change.

Your support helps us:

• Equitably pay our participating composers, poets, video artists, and performers
• Partner with local schools to hold student poetry contests (winner’s work will be set to
  music by a Rising Water composer)
• Rent community-accessible rehearsal and performance space
• Provide ticket-free performances

If today is your day to give, then please use the donation button on this page. Thank you!

The award-winning Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective is a grassroots theatre incubator that operates as a collective of individuals invested in preserving a culture of Black theatre in the city of Birmingham. Our goal is to showcase and introduce Black theatrical work to the city of Birmingham through staged readings, live performance, educational programming for student & professional theatre practitioners through an Afro-Centric lens. BBRTC has a continued laser focus on telling stories of people across the African diaspora who live in the margins and is committed to hiring within those groups as well including; Black women, Black queer people, and Black disabled people. Learn more at theBBRTC.com.

The Black Cherry Tree Project (BCTP) is committed to challenging racial violence and white supremacy through art, dialogue, education, and nature. Focused on honoring the 33 documented lynching victims of Jefferson County, Alabama, BCTP collaborates with local artists to create commemorative artworks and plant Black Cherry trees as living memorials across Birmingham public parks. Each tree is accompanied by a custom-designed marker with a QR code linking to the victims’ stories and an online archive of artworks created in their honor, which are also publicly exhibited to engage and educate the community. As BCTP grows, we are building a reproducible framework to expand “seeds” nationwide—planting trees across states to memorialize lynching victims and support community healing. Through these efforts, public dialogue, and youth education, BCTP aims to inspire policy change and continue the work of dismantling white supremacy for lasting social justice.

Bvlbancha Public Access is a media channel based in Bulbancha, Louisiana. We collect stories, facilitate art, and produce events on Indigenous identity in the Gulf South.

A multinational learning community of Spanish and English–speaking popular theater artists, researchers, students, teachers, and enthusiasts of Caribbean culture and performance. We meet online and face-to-face to share work, ideas, and resources.

The mission of CARPA San Diego is to create a space where Latino artists can showcase their talent through theater, dance, music, and other artistic expressions, reaching out to the community in a non-traditional setting.

Cicada Radio is a New Orleans–based audio production company and podcast network focused on equity, environmental justice, and artistic expression.

Creating New Futures is an arts worker-driven effort speaking to the dance and performance field in what is currently called the United States.

In Phase 1, a group of arts workers came together to create the “living document” Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance, which attempts to frame principles and guidelines for conversations within the dance and performance field to shape our futures in light of the extraordinary chaos and disruption caused by COVID-19. The document addresses concerns regarding cancellations and what future work, funding, survival might look like. More pressingly, it looks beyond the present moment to address longstanding inequities, deficiencies, and power imbalances in the field.

Phase 2 is now emerging and is formed by working groups that include: Black and Indigenous Survivors group, Disability+ group, Intersectional Riders group, and Contracts/Force Majeure group with potential groups in discussion like the Natureculture Watershed group.

The Creative Response Network (CRN) is an emergent and collaborative effort led by a consortium of local arts leaders representing diverse, critical, and justice-focused arts-organizing efforts in New Orleans. Meeting monthly since the start of the pandemic, CRN serves as a resource and advocacy hub. CRN’s approach seeks to reimagine the region’s arts landscape to one that centers on equity, justice, accountability, and sustainable livelihoods through the production, presentation, preservation, advocacy, and cultivation of art. The Network works to address immediate and long-standing forms of inequality and exploitation within the arts through working groups. CRN work focuses on the complicated relationships between place, race, gender, disciplinary practices, and leadership inequality that continues to plague New Orleans’ cultural economy.

Creative Response Network is a New Orleans-based initiative for art, movement building, and radical possibilities. Initiated by Antenna at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 and led initially by Antenna, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and Junebug Projection, CRN provides direct support to artists while engaging a network of 70+ arts and cultural organizations, projects, collectives, and individuals to advance a more just and transformative ecology of equity and sustainability within the arts and cultural sectors of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.

D’Vorah Dance Arts’ mission is to create dance works that shift perspectives inspired by the depths of our human experience. I am seeking support to fund the creative efforts in the development and presentation of The Day You Painted The Stars (a work that was created in response to processing grief with the use of meditation and traveling through the sub-conscious), The Witch of Wellington (a whimsical work inspired by growing up in the suburbs finding that your imagination has turned around and upside down from a unique encounter with a perceived witch), and investigating new ideas during a creative retreat in the spring of 2024. Throughout this process, I will also offer master classes that share my choreographic process and workshops that inspire non-dancers to utilize movement as a healing tool.

DeDeaux has merged art with new technologies for decades to broaden art and audience engagement. Early works from the 1970s such as CB Radio Booths were works of mobility that travelled the communication systems and streets of underserved communities. Mid-career works were large-scale installations and pioneering immersive, synchronized media environments including Soul Shadows, Women Eating, and The Face of God that premiered at the 1996 Olympics. Latter works, including Project Mutants, The Goddess Fortuna and The MotherShip Series, are inspired by environmental challenges.

Works by DeDeaux have been exhibited nationwide including Whitney Museum of American Art, Armand Hammer Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art of Connecticut, The Contemporary / Baltimore, Canadian Film Society of Toronto, and Ballroom Marfa, Marfa TX. Recent exhibitions include her acclaimed Prospect.2 20,000 square foot multimedia installation The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces, and the touring MotherShip Series that adapts the theory that mankind has 100 years left – not to save Earth but to leave. Current exhibitions include a solo exhibition I’ve Seen the Future and It Was Yesterday at Arthur Roger Gallery / New Orleans, her exhibition at MASSMoCA Thumbs Up for the MotherShip, and her participation in the international exhibition Alrededoreson on Chile’s Island of Chiloe in 2018.

DeDeaux is a 1997 Rome Prize recipient as Knight Foundation Visiting Southern Artist at the American Academy in Rome and selected among the eight most important southern U.S. artists by the 1996 Olympics. She is a 2013 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence, the 2014 Prospect New Orleans Triennial Alumni of the Year, and the 2015 Artist in Residence at Tulane University’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research.

DeDeaux’s work is the in-depth subject of the concluding chapter of Discipline and Photograph, a book by art theorist James Huginin of Chicago Art Institute and, Five Video Artists by Larry Qualls, Associate Editor for Performing Arts Journal, MIT Press. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications including New York Times, Art in America, USA Today and ArtForum, and the focus of televised features including CBS Sunday Morning and Canada Public Broadcasting’s series The Future.

DeDeaux is also a writer, publisher and founding editor of Arts Quarterly. She is among the eight founders of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans and served on its Board throughout its formative years. She produced and hosted Louisiana’s first radio program on the arts, Art Now, for National Public Radio affiliate WWNO. As an educator DeDeaux established and directed a comprehensive arts program for a 6,000 inmate facility in Orleans Parish, Louisiana and has been Visiting Artist at a number of institutions including Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Texas A&M Visualization Laboratory within the College of Architecture.

DeDeaux is the winner of the 1976 Demolition Derby in the Louisiana Superdome as the only female contestant in a field of 35 drivers.

Global Nola, is an artist-run organization that promotes and preserves world music and performing arts culture in New Orleans and throughout the world.

As global cultural ambassadors, we produce the Global Groove, bringing New Orleans performing artists together with musicians, dancers, etc. across the globe. With roots in Africa, the Caribbean, North America, South America, and Europe, performing artists share their immense talents with our global audience on both a virtual and live stage. These events shine a bright light on the plight of performing artists globally during, and post pandemic. Community and educational events are also essential, and we often partner with organizations that share common goals.

United in supporting justice and equality for all, the performing artists of the Global Groove bring the world closer together in love, harmony, and expanded cultural worldview.

HBC430 aims to help grow an ecosystem of individuals and organizations dedicated to using art, performance, and creative advocacy to co-create a more just and equitable society for Black and other marginalized people. HBC430 is home of Solid Ground Theatre Company, a growing collective of citizen artists and Instinctive Theatre practitioners. Instinctive theater is an art for social justice technique designed by HBC430 founder, Maryam Foye, inspired by African and Black diasporic ritual, psychodrama, and Theater of the Oppressed.

House of Lux (2023) is a mutual aid play reminiscent of the care practices of the Black & Brown folk who raised us while weathering violent spatial conditions of american state globalization and urbanization events termed “Vietnam war… the crack era…. war on drugs…. war on crime…. AIDS epidemic…” The play is devised with community story bearers and translated by muthi reed in their avatar, wildin. We are reminiscing about past events for folx who survived it. We are weaving together the wisdoms of our survival.

Sankofarration

• it is for us to remember and tell stories of survival and be cared for in the telling.
• the play is a spatial oral archive that makes resonant the complex divinity and dignity of our lives.

Shaped in community with kinfolk and neighbors’ archives, over the course of three years, we will roll out mutual aid còuture — quarterly goodie bags, play script, art; simulating the parables, dreams and stories of the community.

Reassembling Spaces

• exhibition galleries, storefronts, kitchens, theaters, bookstores, radio airwaves, internet platforms, living rooms, outdoor walls, and open fields will become our portals for dreaming.
• looking at archives within our family and kinfolk communities as the thing Toni Morrison named the source of self regard. The thing James Brown called attitude. And what Andaiye named neighborliness.
• we are experimenting with growing strength through building cultural knowledge within the village.

The play and the making of it will channel a mix of legends, lies, lamentations, travel routes, recipes, remedies, libations, provisions, and conjures for getting free staying free. House of Lux intervention architects time through black ritual in the company of kinfolk.

Mind Over Mirrors is the ever-evolving project of composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly, who buttresses his modest instrumental foundation of Indian pedal harmonium with an array of tape delays, effect processors, and synthesizers that belong to the world of classic analog electronic composition. Both as a solo artist and with various collaborators, he creates immersive interdisciplinary work that NPR has described as “an out-of-body experience.” His explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions and the dialogues between cultural traditions—vernacular and avant-garde—have led him down a path of creating work that deliberately situates itself in a questing, edge-of-earth spirit. After five solo albums on several labels, Paradise of Bachelors released Fennelly’s first work for an ensemble, Undying Color (2017), followed by Bellowing Sun (2018), which was commissioned for its world premiere live performance by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Pitchfork called Bellowing Sun, “one of the decade’s true experimental wonders.” Bellowing Sun received funding from the NPN Creation & Forth Fund.

“Come to the garden, and let’s talk.”

JUST SPACE creates a just space for all. This initiative innovatively addresses oppressive systems of power that are rooted in the history and legacy of exploitation. Black and Indigenous youth bear the brunt of the burdens of these systems and JUST SPACE seeks to alleviate part of that.

JUST SPACE is a center for intentional congregation and a program for place reimagination through art. Meet us at the land to garden, make art, laugh, and cry if you need to. The focus is on environmental racism in Indianola, MS. Participants enjoy access to environmental education, art education, and collaborative art production instructed by local artists. This initiative offers free resources to the entire community and is deliberately a safe zone.

Krewe da Bhan Gras represents the South Asian diaspora in South Louisiana. We seek to explore cultural representations of the expansive South Asian community through various artistic endeavors, ensuring all community members feel welcome regardless of religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, or gender.

Last Call is a multiracial collective of queer artists, activists, and archivists. Drawn together by the closing of the last remaining dyke bar, Last Call creates innovative, multi-platform performances, events, and digital media that document and interpret neglected queer history, creating connections between those who lived this history and those who have much at stake if it is forgotten. We conjure up intergenerational gathering places where the movement for queer liberation is carried forward.

There are four interwoven components to Last Call: (1) a digital archive of full-length interviews; (2) a podcast series to cull these interviews into curated stories; (3) live performance that honors these stories; and (4) community events that bring together queer people across lines of race, class, gender-identity and generational difference. Last Call was founded by Rachel Lee, Sara Pic and Lyam Gabel.

Leah Glenn Dance Theatre is a modern dance company dedicated to cultivating a greater understanding of the world in which we live through thought-provoking works of art that entertain, inspire and challenge its audiences.

Set in 1895, when Queen Lili‘uokalani was imprisoned for almost a year in Iolani Palace for her alleged knowledge of an attempt to take back the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, Lili‘u tells the story of the Queen’s life at a time of great upheaval. Denied visitors except for one female companion, Lili‘uokalani depended on secret messages and news that would come to her as wrapping for flowers.

The opera libretto is drawn completely from Lili‘uokalani’s own words (in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i/English): her diary entries, excerpts from her biography, and lyrics from her songs written during the imprisonment.

Lili‘uokalani used her voice to encode hope and seeds of cultural renewal in her writings and musical compositions. Lili‘uokalani’s advocacy for the revival of Hawaiian music and culture is her greatest legacy as seen through her various acts of cultural preservation and through her voice as a composer—a spark of hope in the darkness.

Current project: A Wonder Wander

Go on a date with someone from the future, take a stroll with your great great grandparent, or meet a vibrant version of yourself in a parallel universe in a Wonder Wander play. This innovative theater walk-and-talk questions embedded inequities in our societal systems while engaging you in a unique live experience.

Wonder Wander Future Date is now available to be produced in your location as part of a season, in a fundraiser or festival setting or as devising project with your ensemble or students.

From March 2023 produced by Mondo Bizarro Productions:

Experience a one-of-a-kind time travel date in the Marigny/Bywater with our immersive walk and talk audio play! Single and ready to mingle? Or just time travel curious? Bring your phone, your headphones and an extra sock. You’ll be transported to New Orleans in the year 2299, where you’ll meet locals from the future, share flirting humor, gravity footwear tips and ponder how the choices we make affect generations beyond us. Just don’t say anything that will change the future.

Responses from the audience:

The self-reflection I did after listening to the tree and thinking about my contributions to the earth was sweet and unexpected.

Smelling the landscape, being asked to pay attention and notice things around us. It was all carried by the wit and humor throughout. It was really funny!

I loved walking around the neighborhood and having what I see be connected with the experience.

I really enjoyed being observed by the public, all walking around in a group and laughing with headphones in…loved being involved with a consensual act with a tree.

The idea that concrete sidewalks etc. were there to protect one from the soil which was harmful, and that sometimes plants break through. (I had been weeding my driveway the day before). Hearing a mushroom and tree talk shifted my thinking about environmental impacts and made me think of the book “Should Trees Have Standing”. While the whole premise is inter temporal dating, it’s the little nuances, (Carbon Dioxide release) that I remember. So, I found it a very gentle way to make a very strong statement about environmental policy.

What: A short immersive audio play for an audience. Rather than a traditional play in a theater, this play takes place as the audience takes a physical walk outside “with” the virtual characters. The experience lasts an hour.

Why now: To take an action in response to the earth’s temperatures rising and remaining elevated for many centuries. To be invigorated by an innovative art form and connect during general apocalyptic malaise.

Where: After a brief time travel orientation, the play takes place outside as the audience takes a walk as a group.

Who: People who have a smartphone and can travel on an accessible walking path.

How: Using wireless internet and developments in communication and haptic technology, the audience members hear the characters speak through headphones and respond through their microphone. The characters are not seen but manifest through speaking and listening to the audience member live and “holding hands” through the audience member’s smartphone. Each script is written with improvisational space to accommodate the audience’s responses engaging the audience member whether they are talkative or reserved. A pre-show survey, research, and strategically placed props along the walk customizes the experience.

The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame is committed to supporting and maintaining New Orleans grassroots indigenous cultural expressions, particularly the Mardi Gras Indian tradition which has been carried on exclusively in the African American neighborhoods of New Orleans since the 1880s. The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame works year-round to create community among those who mask; honor the individuals and group who create and uphold the masking traditions; and educate the public.

Dr. Roslyn J. Smith and Cherice Harrison-Nelson co-founded the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame in 1998 through the spirit of Big Chief Donald Harrison Senior (1933-1998), founder of the Guardians of the Flame and a past Big Chief of the White Eagles.

Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins is a weekly public radio broadcast that showcases musicians who have made profound contributions to the musical landscape of Louisiana and the wider world. Host Gwen Thompkins and her guests talk extensively about the fire and sweat of the creative process and parse songs that reflect Louisiana’s unusually varied cultural heritage. Each week, Music Inside Out explores unexpected layers of curiosity and inventiveness in the work of modern-day musicians. Just as Louis Armstrong loved Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and played an aria from that opera every day, contemporary Louisiana artists live with their ears wide open. Music Inside Out airs on WWNO 89.9 FM- New Orleans Thursday evenings at 7:00 p.m. and Saturdays at noon. In addition, web users can access any program at musicinsideout.org.

New Orleans International Muralists, LLC (NOIM) create murals that provide artistic looks into the past, present, or future within communities. Our murals are educational tools for the community, as points of interest(s) for tourism, or simply appreciated for their aesthetic beauty. NOIM’s current project is Tchoupitoulas St. Floodwall Mural: 300 Years of New Orleans History depicting the city’s vibrant 300-year history through imagery created by lead artist Jamar Pierre. Our murals are created to enable the community to gain a better understanding of why cultural preservation is important.

nienteForte Contemporary Music is a concert series that features contemporary music performers and composers from across the globe that provide concert performances and master classes/workshops for the Tulane University, University of New Orleans, and greater New Orleans community. nienteForte is built upon the belief that contemporary music of all shapes and sizes has the ability to resonate with a diverse populace and that any gap between contemporary art and its audience can be bridged with an open and inviting conversation on both sides. The hope is that nienteForte performers, composers, and audience members can walk away from our programs as a singular entity that believes contemporary music and art is something that belongs to all of us collectively and is therefore deserving of our acceptance, respect, and love.

Launched in 2016, No Dream Deferred started as a vision for equitable and inclusive theatre in New Orleans. As a community-anchored theatre that prioritizes New Orleans’ community audience, we produce culturally relevant work written by playwrights that have been historically marginalized. Our values ensure that our productions are relevant, accessible, and affordable for all in our community.

Our vision is to employ a revolutionary approach to art making in our city for our communities and in doing so create theatre that is anchored to place. We, through our programming and advocacy, are building a future where art leaders of color are not the exception but the norm.​

• We work to amplify the voice of historically marginalized playwrights.
• We empower theatre-makers of color in the city of New Orleans and beyond.
• Our approach to theatre-making is equitable in its visioning, design, and implementation.

OUR CORE VALUES

• EQUITY | POWER
  Claiming and giving a rightful share of the artistic pie.
• CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY | REALNESS
  We bring authenticity to the workspace, rehearsal room and table in a way that is essential, valued, and encouraged.
• ​LEGACY | WEALTH
  Excellent stewards of what we have been given. Intentional about what we contribute. Generous with what we leave for future generations.

Onye Ozuzu is a performing artist, choreographer, administrator, educator, and researcher currently serving as the Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida. Ozuzu has dedicated much of her work as a dance artist to cultivating space for diverse dance forms to exist in a pluralist relationship to one another. The deep juxtapositions in her birth and upbringing (biracial, intercultural, with American-Nigerian parents), her orientation towards physical training, and her professional practices have all resulted in understanding the body as technology and an archive that has the capacity to thread meaning through and across diverse languages. Physically, Ozuzu has negotiated the intersectionality in her body between many movement forms from tennis to ballet, West African dance to hatha yoga, freestyle house to salsa, contemporary dance to aikido. Rather than just “collecting” these dance styles, she has cultivated the ability to make choices among these techniques, like the relationship of a maker to their tools.

Artistically, Ozuzu has focused on the body as technology. Space Carcasses is the convergence of her interests in technology and the body and in trans+space+time Africanness. This interdisciplinary performance juxtaposes, superimposes, and amplifies the contested African diaspora relationship between the vaults on Factors Row in Savannah, Georgia; the architecture of La Rochelle, France; and the history of similarly complex sites (in terms of their connection to histories of humans traded as commodities) in Northern Nigeria. Developed in collaboration with visual and graffiti artist Native Maqari and video and projection designer Simon Rouby, the project will use 3D audio and visual technologies to record, recontextualize, and re-remember these spaces that echo with the impact of the events and experiences they have contained, particularly regarding African diasporic migrations. Interfacing the ephemeral residue of the body’s presence with these geographically disparate sites, Space Carcasses will reveal how space, place, history, and lineage are linked together.

The focus of POSTCARDS FROM OVER THE EDGE is to raise awareness and engage the community in:

1. the creation and production of a theatrical work that is a truthful-telling of the historically separate and unequal treatment experienced by the LBGTQ community and woman of color as it relates to the illegal sale of sex in Louisiana,
2. the creation and distribution of postcard art works to organizations providing services such as shelters that serve women and children and other organizations that work with women who have been trafficked,
3. the cultivation of allies and fostering of network building by connect those in the general public that want to be more involved with organizations actively working with the homeless, particularly homeless LBGTQ youth.

Remade Ruins is a future land-based oasis in the magical Black south where beautiful dwellings live, delicious foods grow, and creative spaces thrive to preserve Black history, live a Black present, and inspire Black futures. Rooted in Mississippi, it centers on radical racial and social justice through rest, creative and performing arts, agriculture, and architecture.

Remade Ruins’ four pillars are: Black joy and rest, Black arts and agriculture, Black innovation and liberation, and Black land ownership.

Mississippi is the “blackest” state in America. Yet Black folks own little of its land. Remade Ruins will own land that houses, protects, nourishes, and grows what Black folks have always planted here in Mississippi: the arts, foodways, and culture.

The Spiritual Technologies Project seeks to generate, document, and transmit performative practices that unify and transform individuals and groups of people. The project will manifest through recordings, writing, and live laboratories in which artists, culture bearers, and other creative practitioners explore old and new tools for personal and collective transformation.

We just completed our first digital storytelling project, A Charge to Keep, which explores the contemporary practice of metered hymn singing in African-American churches in Central Georgia and Coastal Georgia and South Carolina. We are excited to share this work with the world!

Collaborators:

• Ron Ragin
• Tamara Roberts
• Michaela Leslie-Rule

The Summer Strings Academy for Girls is an educational summer festival for female-identifying string students. The SSAG is dedicated to creating a safe space to uplift, empower, and inspire young women. Through private lessons and master classes with world-class artists, concerts, workshops, and seminars, the SSAG strives to ignite a shift in the world of classical music education by providing our students with the confidence, knowledge, and skills necessary for navigating this male-dominated industry. The SSAG began as a virtual festival in the Summer of 2021 and has served nearly 40 young women from 11 countries.

Synamin Vixen is a performing artist, community healer, and educator. She has more than 25 years of dance experience locally and internationally, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Black Studies and Dance Composition from Swarthmore College. She has been studying Afro-Diasporic herbal and traditional care practices, reiki, and sex doula work for the past 3 years. With a wide range of experiences, Synamin explores how all of these different artistic interests live in one body and influence each other.

Her choreography sparks conversations on identity and social memory. Much of Synamin’s work explores how individuals relate to and influence groups, and how our narratives on similar events can differ greatly based on our lived experiences. Her work in burlesque (on and off stage) focuses on how the body is a sensual site of transformative healing. In 2021, she released her first book of ancestral poetry entitled Daughter of a Nymph Divine. In 2022, she collaborated with her performance family Haus Contraire in residency at the Contemporary Art Center.

Synamin’s mission is to use movement to create a safe space for dialogue and change.

The Constant State of Otherness is a multi-layered performance project exploring the feelings of isolation and displacement that come from a sense of not fitting in. A devised “otherness template” will fuel a new taiko and dance performance, and also prompt engagement with artists and communities reflecting these complex and diverse stories of identity and emotional impact. The work is inspiring from co-director Michelle Fujii’s experience as a great-granddaughter and wife of Japanese immigrants, and feelings of isolation, alienation, and displacement that come from not having an easy sense of belonging, both as a physical place and an emotional space. These feelings are heightened during our uncertain political times — of deepening socio-economic disparities, ongoing debates of travel bans, border security, gentrification, and hostility towards immigrants.

Unit Souzou ensemble members will explore otherness in their deeply personal stories: identifying as immigrant, navigating privilege as a biracial person, finding space and place as a female leader in a masculine world, being African-American in a Japanese referenced cultural art form. Root questions to create this work will illuminate the following: How have I been othered? How have I othered myself? How have I othered others?

‘Souzou’ can be written in three ways meaning ‘creation’ (創造), ‘imagination’ (想像), or ‘noisy’ (騒々), alluding to a force by which new ideas are born and take shape in the world. Inspired by these words, the mission of Unit Souzou is to build creative, imaginative works while honoring the history and roots of the taiko art form. The core of Unit Souzou’s artistic voice is personal and authentic, sound shaped and inspired by form and by movement. The essence of Unit Souzou is an expressive blend of taiko and Japanese folk dance, forging new traditions for evolving communities. In addition to creating groundbreaking professional theatrical works, Unit Souzou is deeply committed to share taiko through community performances and collaborations, public classes for adults and youth, and school-based education programs.