PERFORMANCE
Vessels
Vessels is a seven-woman harmonic meditation on the transcendental possibilities of song during the Middle Passage. Experienced within an interactive and acoustically rich sculptural environment that invokes those infamous ships, this ritual performance explores singing as a survival tool – to release spirit, reconstitute bodies, and span the gap between sanity and insanity. Using the mechanics of Black Diasporic song, Vessels ignites the musicality present in bound bodies on a move toward freedom. At its core, Vessels is a healing ritual that looks deeply at the wounds of the Middle Passage and at the creative and communal ways our ancestors endured. It will premier in the spring of 2018 in New Orleans and tour up the eastern seaboard and beyond through 2020.
Looking at A Broad
Looking at A Broad is a choreo-poetic solo performance piece. It is a stimulating synthesis of lyrical text and dynamic movement layered with visual and media installation that invites audiences to question, witness and engage the multiple oppressions, expectations and constructions of race, gender and sexuality faced by black women living in the United States.
Alleged Lesbian Activities merges the New Orleans traditions of cabaret, drag, and live music with original movement to tell the stories of downtown dyke bars of the 70s and 80s. Suspending space and time, performers interact with previous generations of queer family through voice-over pulled directly from Last Call’s oral history interviews. Alleged Lesbian Activities brings us closer to the myriad answers of Last Call’s central question, “Where did all the dyke bars go?” by conjuring up a dyke bar as sexy, powerful, vulnerable, and complex as the stories we have heard about them.
Cry You One is an outdoor performance and online storytelling platform from the heart of Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands. Pioneered by the New Orleans based companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro, Cry You One celebrates the people and cultures of South Louisiana while turning clear eyes on the crisis of our vanishing coast.
Lockdown
Set in the context of the privatization of public schools, Lockdown is an original play that explores the impact of education reform in New Orleans post-Katrina. The play follows five adults whose lives are touched by the education system in different ways. Through these characters we get a glimpse into the education system and the challenges that both they and their students face.
Kiss Kiss Julie
Kiss Kiss Julie is an ensemble-generated performance that jumps off from August Strindberg's 1888 play Miss Julie to explore the subsequent decades' impact on sex, class and gender. We push our design-driven theater paradigm even further into a realm of visual art installation and interactive exhibit, as we explore this magical piece of New Orleans ground: former indigo plantation, bed and breakfast, restaurant, and reggae dance club.
Go Ye Therefore
Go Ye Therefore… is a story about two southern women, one white, one black, both daughters and granddaughters of Southern Baptist preachers. Rooted in different racial and cultural worship traditions, Kathy Randels and Rebecca Mwase trouble the waters of their Baptist upbringings in search of spirituality's truth, and revel in the unifying joy of song as they explore the Bible, Baptist history, and the tenuous relationship between the missionary and the native.