ABOUT THE EVENT

Bessie and Herb Alpert Award-winning dancer, choreographer, and Harlem Stage WaterWorks Established Artist, nia love, and her collaborators present UNDERcurrents. We are grateful that you could join us for this powerful project.

Harlem Stage

Artist Statement

UNDERcurrents is both a continuation and a fresh departure within nia love’s long-term project, g1(host):lostatsea. A serial, multi-media performance and research platform, g1(host):lostatsea marks the continuous engagement with the memory and “afterlives” of transatlantic slavery. It pivots on this query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?

Taking off from these initiatives, these questions are explored through two primary thematic elements: water and doors. The point of departure for captive Africans into the Middle Passage is described as “the door of no return.” Conjuring the continual resonance of this world-making and breaking threshold, UNDERcurrents is an immersive audience experience with an installation that is activated by performance.

Our aim here is an experience of immersion that is, most crucially, felt; where the audience participates in a speculative process in which the submerged gestural and elemental traces of transatlantic slavery are made palpable. This is the core of the new departure of UNDERcurrents: we want to bring the audience fully into this world, we want to reduce the distance between the audience and the performance, taking the audience out to sea, or bringing the sea forth, and from this altered perspective we shift our embodied habits of sensing these foundational conditions of our lived environments and histories.

UNDERcurrents photos courtesy of Nic Petry | Dancing Camera

Personnel

Choreographer/Director/ nia love

Performer

Movement Collaborators j. bouey, Cyan Hunter, Lela Aisha Jones, Makeda-Lily Love-Roney, marco farroni leopoldo, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Diana

Composer

Uribe, Jessica Ziegler

Antoine Roney (G Mezzo Soprano

Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Roland AE30)

Musical Collaborators

Kojo Melché Roney (Drums)

Emanuel Ruffler (Keyboards)

Jeremiah Kal’ab (Bass)

Additional Sound Conch Shell Invocation by Coni Lewis Lopez

Quotes from Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Poem by Kamau Braithwaite

The End of a Love Affair by Billie Holiday

Petal of a Rose by Duke Ellington

Video

Projection Design

Costume Design

Technical Design

Lighting Design

Conceptual Design/Writer

Stage Manager

Rhonda Haynes, Aidan Un

Laura Sofía Pérez

Zinda Williams and Islah Abdul

Rahim (mythical beast)

Anthony Fernandez

Amanda K. Ringger

Benin Ford

Buffy

Commissioned by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks Established Artists Program and supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Thompson Family Foundation, and the Leonard & Robert Weintraub Family Fund. Supported by a development residency at Chelsea Factory. The development of UNDERcurrents was made possible, in part, by the Maggie Allesee

National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University.