Theatrical Jazz Conference

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

RARIG CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS

JUNE 13 – 15, 2024

Sincere thanks to our generous contributors...

University of Minnesota

Institute for Advanced Study Department of Theatre Arts + Dance Department of Gender, Women + Sexuality Studies School of Music

George Mason University College of Visual + Performing Arts School of Theater

University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Research Fund Department of Theater

Pillsbury House + Theatre, Minneapolis

Rhythm Visions Production Company, DC

Minnesota Transform

Jerome Foundation

FROM THE CONVENERS

This conference is the brainchild of a few persistent artists, scholars, and administrators committed to extending the legacy of multiple generations of creatives who invoke(d) call-and-response, polyphony, polyrhythm, repetition, and improvisation as theatrical language Accounts of how, when, and where the idea took root are varied; some say it was one snowy afternoon in Laurie Carlos’ living room in Saint Paul during a run of Sharon Bridgforth’s con flama (mounted by Penumbra Theater in 2000); others say it was one summer afternoon in 2017 when Awotunde Judyie Al-bilali and I sat down for cocktails and conversation on Priscilla Maria Page’s back porch in Northampton. While both of those gatherings have fed and nourished this one, the proverbial ball really started rolling in the summer of 2022 when I met Signe Harriday in the lobby of Pillsbury House + Theater and said: “I’ve got this idea for a national conference that brings together emerging and seasoned artists, academic and community partners, and theatrical jazz makers spanning multiple racial, gender, and ethnic divides to celebrate the legacy of our mentors and contemporaries.” And to my great delight and surprise, she said: “Let’s go. ”

Signe, who knew we’d need a LOT of space, called Tracey Deutsch at the University of Minnesota; Tracey called colleagues Margaret Werry and Cindy García, and everybody swung into action I reenlisted long-time friend and collaborator Priscilla, reached out to Renita Martin, and began activating a national network of kindred spriits to bring this vision into view.

On behalf of all the conveners, we hope this conference is filled with moments of celebration and connection, that it propels us into a future that welcomes new practitioners, invigorates collaboration, cultivates artistic expansiveness, and creates a living archive that honors our ancestors. We hope that it highlights the countless contributions that theatrical jazz continues to make to art, culture, and our collective understanding of the world and ourselves.

Welcome,

Djola Branner Director | School of Theater Senior Artis g College of Visual + Performing Arts | GMU Pillsbury House + Theatre

Conveners

Tracey Deutsch

Associate Professor

Dept of History | UMN

Renita Martin

Chief Executive Officer

Rhythm Visions Production Company

Margaret Werry

Chair | Associate Professor of Theatre

Dept of Theatre Arts + Dance | UMN

Cindy García Associate Professor

Interim Director of Dance

Dept of Theatre Arts + Dance | UMN

Priscilla Maria Page

Multicultural Theater Director

Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy

Dept of Theater | UMASS Amherst

Curators

Djola Branner + Sharon Bridgforth + Aimee Bryant + Florinda Bryant

Interns

Thomas Redd – (UMN alum)

Shakir A Lee-Kwekwe + Spencer Wilde – (GMU)

Nathaniel Akingbemi + Sabine Denise Jacques + David Keohane + Tatiana Rodriguez – (UMASS Amherst)

Shaila Schmidt – (UMASS Amherst alum)

Graphic Design + Marketing

Nafisa Ferdous + Arianna Diaz-Celon

Cover Artwork

Daniel Alexander Jones

FROM THE DRAMATURG

“we ‘ourselves’ are high art. Our world is honesty and primal response.”

Ntozake Shange published this declaration in the foreword to Three Pieces: Spell #7, A Photograph, and Boogie Woogie Landscapes (Penguin Books, 1982). Based on the notes, she drew from a journal entry written in New York City in January 1979 to craft this introduction. Just five years earlier, she had begun performing a version of for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf with Paula Moss in bars and cafes in the Bay Area. They then traveled to New York City and began performing it in places such as Studio Rivbea, a significant loft space run by Sam and Bea Rivers Playwright Ifa Bayeza, Shange’s sister, provided dramaturgy for the piece and made an introduction to Oz Scott who would direct it at New Federal Theater, led by Woodie King, Jr Laurie Carlos and Trazana Beverely joined the ensemble at that time and then the Public Theater decided to produce it in 1976 Six months later, for colored girls… transferred to Broadway where it ran for two years. By the end of that run in 1979, Shange had a lot to say about the American theater. In the same foreword, she writes:

We are selling ourselves & our legacy quite cheaply/ since we are trying to make our primary statements with somebody else’s life/ and somebody else’s idea of what theater is. I would suggest that: we demolish the idea of a straight theater for a decade or so, refuse to allow playwrights to work without dancers and musicians.

As a poet and performer, Shange deeply understood the interdisciplinary nature of Black cultural expression and generated her major theatrical works with trailblazing jazz musicians such as David Murray, Anthony Davis, Oliver Lake, Baikida Carroll, and others Her directive in the opening remarks to this collection of plays can be thought of as a blueprint for theatrical jazz as we explore what this form is while we consider its legacy and its future. This gathering is meant to collectively name the many permutations of theatrical jazz with special attention given to some of our forebears: Ntozake Shange, Laurie Carlos, and Sekou Sundiata. Each of them forged their lives as bastions

of innovative performance and creative leaders who pushed artistic, cultural, and social boundaries They themselves are high art and deserve to be recognized as such

To close the circle, I share one more anecdote by Shange, who recalls trumpet player and composer Lester Bowie’s observation after the World Saxophone Quartet performed at the Public Theater. He said to her: “Those guys are the greatest comedy team since the Marx Brothers.” And she mused:

“In other words/ they are theater. Theater which is an all encompassing moment/ a moment of poetry/ the opportunity to make something happen. We should think of George Clinton/ a.k.a. Dr. Funkenstein/ as he sings/ “here’s a chance to dance our way out of our constrictions.”

Let us dance, sing, and shout our way to freedom in all its manifestations as we pay homage to those who came before and collectively dream a new world together

Dr Priscilla Maria Page Summer 2024

THURSDAY, JUNE 13

3pm on...

Check-In + Registration

7 – 8pm Reception

8 – 9pm Welcome – Conveners

Land Acknowledgment – Sara Pillatzki-Warzeha

Invocation – Marvin K White

9 – 10:30pm

Open Mic – Shá Cage + E G Bailey

Cast of the 2022 Broadway revival of for colored girls from left: Tendayi Kuumba, Kenita R Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Amara Granderson, Alexandria Wailes, Stacey Sargeant and D Woods Direction by Camille Brown, Dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks, Photo by Sara Krulwich/NYTimes

FRIDAY, JUNE 14

9:30 – 11am

Workshop – Noelle Awadallah + Leila Awadallah, “Body Watani”

Playwright’s Roundtable – Sharon Bridgforth + Zell Miller III + Virginia Grise + Djola Branner, moderator

Showcase – Antonio Duke, Ifé Lab

11:15am – 12:45pm

Workshop – Marvin K. White, “Truth + Testimony”

Dramaturg’s Roundtable – Talvin Wilks + Megan Monaghan Rivas + Alexis Pauline Gumbs + Priscilla Maria Page, moderator

Showcase – Shá Cage, Hallelujah Gotdamn!!

2 – 3:30pm

Workshop – Aimee Bryant, “The Script is the Score”

Archivists + Publisher’s Roundtable – Steven G. Fullwood + Kate Kremer + Lisa C. Moore + Tracey Deutsch, moderator

Showcase – Zell Miller III, Chronicles of an Indigenous Offspring

3:45 – 5:15pm

Workshop – Sharon Bridgforth, “Embodying Theatrical Jazz”

Director’s Roundtable – Signe V. Harriday + Regina Victor + Ebony Noelle

Golden + Awotunde Judyie Al-bilali, moderator

Showcase – Virginia Grise, These Are My Papers

5:30 – 6:30pm

Jam / Freestyle / Improv – Mankwe Ndosi

8 – 10pm

Performances + Talk Back

Ebony Noelle Golden + Company – Quickening: Ceremonies from In the Name of The Mother Tree

Sage Ni‘Ja Whitson + Douglas Ewart + Marvin K. White + Talief Ticker + Tumelo Khupe – this here dust

SATURDAY, JUNE 15

9:30 – 11am

Workshop – Sonja Parks, “Come Empty: Channeling in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic, part 1”

Choreographer’s Roundtable – Ananya Chatterjae + Cynthia Oliver + Orlando Hunter-Valentine + Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, moderator

Showcase – Queen Drea, Mawu: The Creator Goddess

11:15am – 12:45pm

Workshop – Sonja Parks, “Come Empty... part 2”

Mover’s + Shaker’s Roundtable – Masanari Kawahara + Cindy García + Patricia Brown + Renita Martin, moderator

Showcase – Awotunde Judyie Al-bilali, Between Tattoos: A Biomythography

2 – 3pm

Blue Notes – Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

3:15 – 4pm Break Outs 4:15 – 5:15pm Collective Responses 7 – 9pm

Community Dinner – Ted Mann Lobby, UMN

9 – 9:45pm

Tribute to Laurie Carlos – featuring excerpts from White Chocolate for my Father + Marion’s Terrible Time of Joy + The Pork Chops Wars 9:45 – 10:15pm

Closing 10:15pm – 1am

Dancing!

WORKSHOPS

“Body Watani” with Leila Awadallah + Noelle Awadallah

Body Watani (BW) names the research, practice and performance endeavors of Palestinian American sisters Leila and Noelle who are committed to investigating the question of homeland in the body. BW Dance is a container with soft edges, an invitation for peoples to come together in motion to contemplate the beautiful and complicated resonance of homeland/s that ripple through each step and breath we take.

“Truth + Testimony” with Marvin K. White

This workshop focuses on the creation of DIY ceremony We will draw inspiration from personal objects to write + embody poetic text, and conjure collective truth through testimony.

“The Script Is the Score” with Aimee K. Bryant

In this music workshop, participants will explore creating vocal music and body percussion to accompany theatrical jazz text.

“Embodying Theatrical Jazz” with Sharon Bridgforth

Participants will experience an improvisational process for the embodiment of Bridgforth's text, bull-jean/we wake. Bridgforth will use gestural language to communicate requests to participants to speak, sing, translate (into non-English languages) or move with assigned text.

This polyrhythmic/synchronistic/multi-languaged-cacocphony of blues/prayers/chants/laughter/dreaming - is the living soundscape that stirs the roux that activates theatrical jazz.

“Come Empty” ™: Channeling in The Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic: Parts 1 + 2” with Sonja Parks

This two-part workshop is a process for individuals to examine the rehearsal space and theatre not as places of polite, practiced perfection, but as sacred, raunchy, after-hours spots sweaty and sweet. Participants will explore simultaneity, collaboration, process-over-product, audience engagement, and the African concept of nommo (the power of words to create balance and harmony from discord).

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali is a theater artist, writer and arts educator She has performed and directed off-Broadway, at regional theaters and is the Artistic Godmother of Re/Emergence Collective based in New England. Currently Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she has taught nternationally, notably as a Fulbright Scholar at the y Western Cape in South Africa where she founded an Applied Theater company, Brown Paper Studio. While traveling around the world on a ship to eleven countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia, she taught her innovative process as Semester at Sea faculty. A trademarked methodology, Brown Paper Studio is part of UMass Theater’s curriculum. Her work is featured in the award-winning publication Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Judyie is the author of For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, a self-published memoir and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku poetry published by Indian Hill Press. Her newest book and performance project, Between Tattoos: A Biomythography charts the journey of a Black woman theater artist though the years 2019 to 2021, the pivot point towards Earth’s positive future she comes from the future to herald. Judyie’s plays, The Death of Black & White, Ice House and Savior’s Day have been produced at community and college theaters. She lives on the island of Nôepe also known as Martha's Vineyard, located in Wôpanâak territory. She acknowledges Nôepe’s lands, waters, plants and animals as a source of inspiration and expresses her gratitude to the Wôpanâak people for their continuous role as the traditional stewards of their ancestral home. Photo credit: Abdul Arafat. www.judyiealbilali.com

Leila Awadallah is a dancer and choreographer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and sometimes Beirut, Lebanon. She moves in a body flowing with Palestinian blood. Her artistic work and practice navigate the terrain of Palestinian diaspora, exile and refugee lineages in rebellion of Israel's settler colonial apartheid on her peoples' ancestral land. Leila is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project with Noelle Awadallah. She is a McKnight Dancer (2022), Jerome Hill (2021), Daring Dances (2019) and Springboard for the Arts (2018) fellow. Leila is a collaborator of the Theater of the Women of the Camp (Lebanon), and danced with Ananya Dance Theater for 6 seasons (2014-2019) In her free time, she practices Tai Chi, Aikido, and plays ukulele. Photo credit: Kerem Yucel

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Noelle Awadallah لاﻮﻧ(she/her) is a PalestinianAmerican dancer, improviser, choreographer, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis) Her work as the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance is underscored by five years (and counting) of dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre, a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018), and her daily pursuit of a“land-based life,” which emerges from sumud a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. For Noelle, sumud drives her commitment and approach to multidirectional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, futuristic imagination as a strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. Photo credit: Isabel Fajardo

E.G. Bailey, named one of Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film, and a McKnight Media Artist Fellow, is an Ivey award-winning artist, filmmaker, director and producer. He is the recipient of a regional Emmy, LIN travel grant, and the Hughes, Diop, Knight Poetry Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Conference. His work is featured in the Target Art Connects commercial, now archived at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). He was an editor for the film, Petting Zoo, which debuted at the 65th International Berlin Film Festival Bailey has directed and assisted plays for well-known production houses, such as: The Guthrie, Pillsbury House, and Children’s Theater. Titles include: Othello, Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s, Juno and the Paycock, The Brother Size, and Shá Cage’s N-Word and U/G/L/Y. He is the co-founder of Tru Ruts Endeavors, MN Spoken Word Association, and the Million Artist Movement Bailey’s written works have been published in Solid Ground, the millennial issue of DrumvoicesRevue, Warpland, a publication by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota, an anthology.

Film credits include: the feature documentary Underbelly that spotlights healing and activism in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Kiss the Tiger's Grown Ass Woman, New Neighbors (Sundance), horror short; You're Home Now, At the Corner of Experimental Doc series, narrative features Jasmine is a Star, 39 Seconds; The John Donaldson Story, The Guthrie Theater’s Dickens Holiday Classic and Ten Thousand Things Handprints. His latest international work includes the co-curation of America Now!, a special film project which

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

has taken place at the Tampere Film Festival in Finland, Latvia and others. His film, New Neighbors, premiered at the 2017 Sundance film festival, and has been won numerous awards and screened at over 100 festivals world-wide.

Djola Branner (he/him) is an artist/educator who’s original full-length and one-act shows give voice to individuals historically absent from the stage, and explore the broad range of identities and cultural experiences that define 21st century America.

Co-founder of the award-winning performance group Pomo Afro Homos, Djola toured nationally and internationally with their shows Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life and Dark Fruit. In addition to performing in regional theaters across the country, he has created such original productions as Sutta, sash & trim, The House that Crack Built, cover, oranges & honey, Mighty Real: A Tribute to Sylvester, and Sweet Sadie. Djola’s interdisciplinary work has been supported by Creative Capital, Jerome, McKnight, and Bush Foundations, and most recently by a Cadence Pipeline New Works Fellowship mentored by Tony and Pulitzerwinning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Djola has published in multiple anthologies including Black Gay Genius, In the Life, Colored Contradictions, Staging Gay Lives and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Lesbian and Gay Black Writers, and his first book of collected plays, sash & trim and other plays, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2014.

Djola’s professional life has been defined by a passion for scripting, staging, and performing original theater, and that passion has defined his approach to teaching as well. His classrooms are marked by a commitment to unearthing the authentic voice of every student/artist through an integration of theatrical disciplines, and a challenge to examine the cultural and historical context of contemporary American theater. Djola has taught dance, acting, and dramatic writing for more than thirty years in community and academic settings including Stanford University, University of Minnesota, Macalester College, American Musical & Dramatic Academy, Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Brown University. He is currently a Professor of Theater and Director of the School of Theater at George Mason University.

He is a proud member of the Dramatists’ Guild.

Photo credit: Dani Werner. www.djolabranner.com

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Sharon Bridgforth collaborates with interdisciplinary artists, and audiences to install moving soundscapes of the ritual/jazz texts in celebration of AfricanAmerican Southern Migration histories/queerly.

A 2020-2024 Playwrights’ Center Core Member, 2022-2023 McKnight National Fellow, 2023 United States Artists Fellow and a 2022 Winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, a New Dramatists alumnae, and Doris Duke Performing Artist, Sharon has received support from Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Her work is featured in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature; Mouths of Rain an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought; Feminist Studies Vol 48 Number 1, honoring 40 years of This Bridge Called by Back and But Some of Us Are Brave! Sharon's bulljean & dem/dey back, and All These Things: A Conversation by Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones are published by 53rd State Press. AdeRisa Productions produced the bull-jean & dem/dey back Los Angeles Book Party Documentary directed by Adelina Anthony.

An Associate Company Member at Pillsbury House + Theatre, Sharon's dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS platform A MAP Fund Scaffolding for Practicing Artists Coach, Sharon is a 2022 AARP Minnesota and Pollen’s 50 Over 50 honoree and a long-time member of Pangea World Theater and Art2Action's National Institute for Directing and Ensemble sCreation

A writer, dramaturg, voice over performer and mentor for Ananya Chatterjea Dance Theatre, Sharon was a writer and performer in Amara Tabor-Smith’s REVIVAL: Millennial Remembering in the Afro NOW and has served as dramaturg for Urban BushWomen Choreographic Center Initiative’s Choreographic Fellowship program, Marjani Forté-Saunders + Everett Saunders 7NMS, Maria Bauman, Sage Whitson, Alicia Morales, Rebecca Mwase & Ron Ragin and Leslie Parker.

Thanks to Archivist Steven G. Fullwood, The Sharon Bridgforth Papers, 1989-2015, Sc MG 845 are archived at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY. www sharonbridgforth com

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

years, Patricia Brown has participated in the Cities arts community as a dancer, instructor, rmer, and choreographer At times traditional, mes a fusion, her style is rooted in African oric dance. She has been a teaching artist with Essence WITNESS School Program for 25 director of Brown Spirit Dance Ensemble for 15 nd is the new Director of Programming and lack Youth Healing Arts Center. She was a Theater and Dance Department at Macalester College for 25 years, adjunct faculty in the University of Minnesota's Dance Department for 22 years, and an instructor for Penumbra Theatre's Summer Institute for 26 years.

Patricia has received numerous awards for teaching, performing, and creating choreography for dancers, actors, and choirs Her choreography has been seen on area stages including the Frey, Park Square, Pillsbury House, Southern, SteppingStone, Walker Arts Center, Macalester College, University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Historical Society. As a movement coach, she has worked with the History, Penumbra, and Pillsbury House Theaters Her performance credits include the Children's Theatre Company, The Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, JSB TEKBOX, O'Shaughnessy Auditorium, Patrick's Cabaret, and Penumbra Theater. Patricia was the founder, director, choreographer, and costumer of The Spirit of Ashé Performing Arts Company, a member of The Circle of Choice Ensemble, The Dancers and Drummers of Langa, Nimely Pan African Dance Company, Burundi African Dance Company, and a guest performer with Sundance Productions Multiple Performing Arts Company. Her national credits include Jazz at Lincoln Center, NY, Guthrie Theater, MN, LIed Center for Performing Arts, NE, University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, MI, Lincoln Memorial, DC, St. John the Divine, NY, and the Center for Puppetry Arts, GA.

Aimee K. Bryant has built a lengthy resume performing on stages throughout the Twin Cities since graduating from Howard University. Most recently, she appeared in The Bull Jean Stories and Bull Jean/We Wake at Pillsbury House + Theatre, and Life on the Moon at the Detroit Rep. In addition to being a director and actor, Aimee is a resident teaching artist at PH+T, a songwriter, and a vocalist. Her debut cd Becoming is available online. Aimee was named City Pages 2015 Actress of the Year, and is a McKnight Theatre Artist Fellow for 2015-2016.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Shá Cage is a renaissance artist who directs, acts, and writes in theater and film. She has been called a change-maker and one of the leading artists of her generation. Her work has taken her across the U.S. and to Japan, Africa, England, Bosnia, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany and more. She is cofounder of Mama Mosaic Theater for women and has een devising and creating solo driven ritual theater eative placemaking spectacle for the past 20 years ows U/G/L/Y, Nword, Say Her Name, and Testify. Directing credits include Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel and Jacklyn Backus' Men on Boats at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun (Rochester Rep Co-Directed w/ EG Bailey), Michael Garces’ 36 Yesses (Cornerstone Theater/LA), Clare Baron’s Dance Nation (Guthrie/UMN), Joselyn Bioh’s School Girls (Arkansas Rep) and (The Jungle Theater), Michael Bobbit’s adaptation of Three Little Birds (The Children’s Theater), Benjamin Benne’s Neighbors (MN History Theater), Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Everybody (Guthrie/UMN), Shavunda Horsley’s BITCH (Bedlam Theater), Waterfront’s The Viking and the Gazelle (Mixed Blood Theater) and Buttafly Precinct which she authored (Black Lives/ Black Words Festival). She was seen last on stage in the one woman tour de force Re-Memori at Penumbra Theater and as Hermione in Ten Thousand Things Winter’s Tale and Lady Capulet in The Guthrie Theater’s Romeo and Juliet. She has led racial justice & equity work in community through Tru Ruts for the past 23 years and Film work through Black Star Studios. She holds TCG, McKnight, Doris Duke, Emmy and Ivey awards and is a proud member of the Dramatist Guild, Actor’s Equity, SAG, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). IG: ShaCageMpls

Ananya Chatterjea‘ s work as a choreographer, dancer, and thinker brings together Contemporary Dance, social justice choreography, and a commitment to healing justice. She is the Artistic Director of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT), a professional ensemble company of Black and brown artists dancing social justice choreography. She is the creator of ADT’s movement signature vocabulary, Yorchhā, and the primary architect of the company ’ s justice- and community-oriented choreographic methodology, Shawngrām. She is also the convener of the company ’ s NextGen ChoreoLab program, which supports emerging BIPOC choreographers working in non-mainstream aesthetics. ADT will mark its 20th anniversary in 2025.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Ananya is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 and 2021 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016, Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and the 2021 A. P. Andersen Award. Her work has toured widely to international and national venues. She is currently creating Antaranga, Between You and Me, a piece exploring intimacies across difference, with the support of an NPN Creation Fund grant. Antaranga will premiere in September 2024, and tour to 5 cities thereafter

In her role as Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota, Ananya teaches courses in Dance Studies, contemporary practice, and Choreographing Social Justice. Her second book, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies (2020, Palgrave McMillan), re-framing understandings of Contemporary Dance from the perspective of dance-makers from global south locations, was awarded the 2022 Brockett Book Prize by Dance Studies Association Her most recent book, an edited anthology, Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice, was published by University of Washington Press in 2022. Photo credit: Canaan Mattson. www.ananyadancetheatre.org

SHESHE Dance, as unique & commanding as her name, steps proudly into her destiny mapped by the stars of her ancestors with intention. She's a 2016 replanted New Yorker, hailing from "the scenic city of the south" Chattanooga, Tennessee. A soulful vocalist inspired by BLACK music, lyrics & poetry, SHESHE executes with joy & passion. https://www sheshedance com

Tracey Deutsch (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History. She teaches, researches, and writes in critical food studies, gender and women ’ s history, the history of capitalism, and modern US history She is committed to humanities’ public engagement and currently serves as PI of Minnesota Transform: Just Universities for Just Futures. She has published a book, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Government, and American Grocery Stores, 1919-1968, as well as academic and public essays on food and unpaid labor, on the uses of women ’ s history in contemporary local foods discourses, and on the politics of consumption more generally She co-edited a special issue of Gender & History on Food & Sovereignty, and is currently writing about

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

the politics and geopolitics of gourmet food and domestic labor in the mid-century US, as well as the possibilities of public engagement to build universities' capacities for racial justice and decolonial work

Queen Drea, a 2022 McKnight Composers Fellow, is a sound alchemist, mixing sonic potions laced with looped vocals, jagged rhythms, and found sounds. She has designed for Pillsbury House, Penumbra, and the Minnesota Children’s Theaters, dance companies, BrotherHood Dance, and Ananya Dance Theater. Queen has created interdisciplinary work about depression in the Black community, a music and movement piece titled “From Black Wombs” about two sisters who have lost their parents in the revolutionary war against white supremacy, and a four-movement musical work about an African creator goddess named Mawu (Lisa), associated with the Sun and Moon in African Dahomey mythology. “I make worlds with my compositions. Glitchy vocals, guttural cries, scratchy sounds, earpiercing ground loops, and off-kilter rhythms are what I do. Everything is intentional, yet improvisational in nature If my compositions invoke visceral responses in the listener, then I’ve done my job.” www.queendrea.com

Note: Mawu: The Creator Goddess “features the words and voices of griots ShaVunda Brown, Jandeltha Rae, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Antonio Duke: THE IFÈ LAB PROGRAM DIRECTOR: (He/Him/His) “I am an actor, playwright, director, and griot: a solo West African oral storyteller. My goal is to provide easily accessible digital theater that motivates, inspires, and replenishes black communities. Digital theater is theater that is filmed and streamed. If black communities don't have easy access to theater that reflects back at us our humanity, then we are not able to envision our artistic future. I have been a digital theater maker since 2012. Pillsbury House Theater received The Summer 612 Micro Grant and hired my brothers and I to create a theater piece centered on nonviolence in the Powderhorn Community. The culmination of the grant was a digital theater piece at the Minneapolis Central Library. I continued my relationship with Pillsbury House Theater in 2012 as part of their Late Nite Series. After graduating from The University of Minnesota/Guthrie B.F.A Actor Training Program I received the 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship with

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Pillsbury House Theatre where I created my first solo play called Ashes of Moons. My second solo play Tears of Moons was accepted into The Guthrie Theatre’s Solo Emerging Artist Celebration in 2019. Since then, Tears of Moons has been filmed and streamed with Parksquare Theater With these two pieces I received an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship the same year. I created my third solo play Missing Mississippi Moons with additional support from The Minnesota State Arts Board’s Artist Initiative Grant. Missing Mississippi Moons was filmed and streamed by Combustible Theater Company, Los Vegas Theater Company, and The Guthrie Theater I am a Wonderlust Ensemble Member.”

ps best known as a composer, improviser, ptor and maker of masks and instruments, uglas R. Ewart is also a lecturer, arts organization nsultant, Emeritus Professor of School of the Art titute of Chicago, and all-around visionary. In jects done in diverse media throughout an award ning and widely-acclaimed 40-year career, Mr. Ewart has woven his remarkably broad gifts into a single sensibility that encourages and celebrates--as an antidote to the divisions and compartmentalization afflicting modern life-the wholeness of individuals in culturally active communities

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1946, Douglas R. Ewart immigrated to Chicago, Illinois in the United States in 1963. His travels throughout the world and interactions with diverse people since then has, again and again, confirmed his view that the world is an interdependent entity An example of his efforts both to study and to contribute to this interdependence is his use of his prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship to study both modern Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute, and also to give public performances while in Japan. In America, his determination to spread his perspective is part of the inspiration behind his multidisciplinary works and their encouragement of artist-audience interactions. It is also the basis of the teaching philosophy with which he guided his classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for twenty-five years, and the basis of the perspective he has brought to his service on advisory boards for institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer (New York City) and Arts Midwest. Mr. Ewart uses his past experience as chairman of the internationally renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to celebrate and build upon the history and achievements of the organization, and is from this perspective a natural extension of the activities he has been engaged in for the past four decades.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Steven G. Fullwood is an archivist, writer, and editor. Fullwood is the former assistant curator of the Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Fullwood is the founder of the In the Life Archive, a project to collect, preserve, and make available to the public materials produced by and about LGBTQ people of African descent at the Schomburg Center

As an archivist, he assisted in the acquisition, supervision, and processing of several theater-related collections including the Helen Armstead-Johnson Collection, James Baldwin Papers, Djola Branner Papers, Sharon Bridgforth Papers, Alice Childress Papers, Bill Gunn Papers, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, and American Negro Theatre Records, and Negro Ensemble Company Records.

Independently, Fullwood worked with the National Black Theatre (NBT) to secure their records for storage during the organization’s transition from their original building to a new one currently under construction. In 2018, he consulted with the Black Theatre Commons to lead an initiative to help Black theaters discover and manage their archival legacies Through this effort, Fullwood worked with Arena Players in Baltimore to deposit their records at Morgan State University.

Fullwood is the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project, an initiative that partners with organizations, institutions, and individuals to establish, preserve, and enhance collections that explore the African Diasporic experience. His published works include Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (co-edited with Charles Stephens) and Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (co-edited with Lisa C. Moore).

Currently, he serves as the coordinator for Marking Time, Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration project, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, which includes managing a traveling exhibition, as well as leading Archiving Marking Time, an initiative to help individuals and organizations associated with the project with their archival needs

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Cindy García is an Associate Professor, dance and cultural studies theorist, and performance ethnographer in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at theUniversity of Minnesota. She is the founding editor of Contours ArteCalle, a collaborative, decolonial feminist, bilingual performative publication that focuses on transnational community-engaged activism, anti-racism, and relationship-building in the Americas. She is the author of “The Small Activisms of Everyday Life” in Contours (2022) and Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles (2013).

Ebony Noelle Golden is a theatrical ceremonialist, culture strategist, entrepreneur, and public scholar. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy that devises systems, strategies, and social justice solutions nationally In 2020, she founded Jupiter Performance Studio, a space to study and practice Black diasporic performance traditions. Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Transformational Practice Award, Golden works to incite and ignite the creative capacity of everyday folks in service of liberation and collective wellbeing. Her practice is rooted in community-design, ritual performance, and leadership development through a womanist and Black feminist praxis. Invoking messy, magical, and medicinal processes, Ebony and her collaborators, work to conjure a better world. www.bettysdaughterarts.com IG: @ebonynoellegolden

Virginia Grise writes plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. She is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Dorito (Autonomedia Press). Her interdisciplinary body of work includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alumnae of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute Grise has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center, and a Herberger Institute Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre

Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women ’ s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

exis Pauline Gumbs is cherished by a wide range of ommunities as an oracle and a vessel of love. Drawing on over 25 years of experience as a writer and facilitator, her inclusive practice finds us and brings us into the ceremonies we have always eeded. Her books include: Undrowned: Black eminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press 20), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke Press, 2020), M End of the World (Duke Press 2018), Spill: Scenes Fugitivity (Duke Press, 2016) and Revolutionary n the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016). Alexis was e dramaturg for the world premiere of Sharon ack Mermaid Man Lady, directed by Ebony Noelle d for the world premiere of Bull Jean and Dem/dey back, directed by Daniel Alexander Jones in 2023.

Alexis recently won the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry. In 2022 Alexis was honored with a Whiting Award in non-fiction and was lauded for creating "modern fables that offer new methods of feeling," and was also a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow In 2020-2021 Alexis was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship. Alexis and her partner Sangodare have received many honors, including an Advocate 40 under 40 feature for their decade of work to create an intergenerational living library of Black LGBTQ brilliance called Mobile Homecoming. Alexis lives in Durham, North Carolina where she nurtures and is nurtured by a visionary creative community while scheming towards her dream of being your favorite cousin. Her new biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde arrives from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux on August 20th of this year! www.alexispauline.com

Photo credit: Sufia Ikbal-Doucet.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

V. Harriday is a fierce visionary and powerful teller who crafts theatre that awakens our vidual and collective humanity As a director, tidisciplinary artist, activist, and facilitator, she s theatre as a catalyst to ask questions about we are and who we are in relation to each other. r Artistic Producing Director of Pillsbury House Co-founder of Million Artist Movement, a collective of artists committed to Black liberation. Co-founder of the award-winning synchronized swimming team, The Subversive Sirens. Founder of Rootsprings Coop, a retreat center for BIPOC artists/activists/healers. Co-founder of MaMa mOsAiC, a women of color theater company whose mission is to evoke positive social change through female centered work. Core team member of REPCommunity Partners an abolition project. She earned her MFA in Acting at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and Moscow Art Theatre, and is a Hermitage Fellow. Recent theatre projects: Director of Bridgforth's bull-jean stories, Harris' What to Send Up When it Goes Down, CoDirector of Chen's PASSAGE and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower Opera by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, Choreographer for Love of Silver Water, Playwright for Dysmorphia. Other directing credits: Dining with the Ancestors, Fannie Lou Hammer Speak On It, Hidden Heroes, Cardboard Piano, Agitators, and various workshops. www.SigneHarriday.com

Orlando Hunter-Valentine is a choreographer who researches, illustrates, and creates from a same gender loving African - American U S born perspective. A descendent of the great migration, great grandchild of farmers, his work tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system He works as a Hood Agroartupreneur encouraging dance, agriculture, technology for embodied and ecological sustainabi y completed my MFA in Dance with a specialized stu e and Technology at The Ohio State University and founder of Brother(hood) Dance! https://bhooddance com https://dancingfarmerblog.wordpress.com

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is interested in performance, visual art, community-building and the places where these forms meet Her original performances include sista docta, a critique of academic life, and Searching for Ọṣun, an ethnographic performance installation around the Divinity of the River. In 2023, she was a featured performer in the premiere of Sharon Bridgforth’s bull-jean/we wake at Pillsbury House Theatre, and presented sista docta/REBIRTH at the Buena Vista Theatre in San Antonio. Omi founded the Performing Blackness Series and the ISESE Gallery at the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and launched the Austin Project a collective of Global Majority women and allies who use art for personal and social transformation. Her dramaturgical work includes Sharon Bridgforth’s con flama, August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and Shay Youngblood’s Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery Omi is currently working as a consultant on Virginia Grise’s Rasgos Asiaticos, and is a board member for Invertigo Dance Theatre in Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, and her most recent publication is the short fiction, “Thank You Kindly,” Feminist Studies, Vol 48, Nol 1, 2022. Omi holds a Ph.D. from New York University and an Embodied Social Justice Certificate from Transformative Change. She has been shaped by Robbie McCauley’s activist art, Laurie Carlos’s insistence on being present, and Barbara Ann Teer’s overt union of art and Spirit. Omi is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, a mother, a Queer wife and a curious sojourner. Photo credit: Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

masanari Kawahara 川原正也 (he/him) is a buto doer, theatre artist, puppeteer, and arts educator. In June, 2024 his next work, doro doro, soundscape by Sho Nikaido, will premiere as part of Isolated Acts at Red Eye Theater He also performed in Lelis K Brito’s A Binding Strangeness as part of Isolated Acts at Red Eye Theater, and Valerie Oliveiro’s SOFT FREEDOMS as part of MERGE at the Cowles Center (2022). His solo piece 8’46” (movement for healing), featuring a recorded soundscape by Sho Nikaido, was performed as part of Offerings: BareBones 2020, and was recognized in StarTribune’s 2020 Artists of the Year edition. Previously Masanari was a member of the buto group Nenkin Butoh Dan, which received a 2015 Sage Award for outstanding dance ensemble for Fu.Ku.Shi.Ma. Other movement projects include: Anthea Hamilton’s Cabbage Four Ways (2021) as

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

part of Paradox of Stillness at Walker Art Center; Throw Open the Heavy Curtain (2018) by Sharon Picasso Projects; prairie/concrete (2023), Census (2016), Every Other (2015) and Fold (2014) by Aniccha Arts. masanari is currently the Director of Naked Stages program as well as a Resident Teaching Artist at Pillsbury House + Theatre. masanari is a Playwrights’ Center McKnight Theater Artist Fellow 2018-2019 and 2010-2011.

Tumelo Khupe (alias Melo) is a performing artist, krumper, and emerging choreographer based in the Twin Cities and from Botswana. Her artistry investigates and explores how the body manifests lived experiences through movement. Krump is foundational in her work as it offers endless possibilities for storytelling through its technique and language. She makes use of some elements of theater to reveal these moments through freestyle/improvisation.

She graduated with a B.A in Music Theater with a minor in Dance. Awards include the David Wick Leadership Award, the David Wick Best Choreography Award, and The Mabel Meta Frey Outstanding Theater Artist Award. She is a Naked Stages Fellow, Generating Room Fellow, Next Step Fund grantee, and most recently, Next-Generation Choreography Lab Fellow. Tumelo has performed with the Emmy award winning US national tour of the Hip Hop Nutcracker.

Kate Kremer is an interdisciplinary artist, playwright, and publisher. Her plays have been produced at JACK in Brooklyn, the Flow Chart Foundation, the Public Theater, Dixon Place, SFX Fest, the Motor Company, the Wild Project, Brooklyn College, and Stagefemmes. Charlatans was selected for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. Kate has been a finalist for the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Award, sh Tom LaFarge Award and the Leslie Scalapino Award honorable mention for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. Her performance installation uncollected trash collection premiered at the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and was published in 2022 by 53rd State Press In 2017, Kate took over the editorship of the experimental play publishing organization 53rd State Press from founding editor Karinne Keithley Syers. 53rd State publishes writing that expands our notions of the theatrical in performance and in print

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Recently, we ’ ve published work by Sharon Bridgforth, Eisa Davis, Daniel Alexander Jones, Haruna Lee, and Jillian Walker. Kate received her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She currently teaches playwriting at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. katekremer.com 53rdstatepress org

Sierra Leverett is a talented performer who has captivated audiences in Brooklyn, New York, for just over a decade. Her love for theatre was ignited with classic musical theater and has since evolved to encompass avant-garde works and groundbreaking workshop processes that delve into the depths of Black and queer narratives that speak to her personal interests and expansive abilities. Her ambition extends beyond the stage, as Sierra hopes to embark on touring shows and expand her impact as a visionary curator and producer. www.sierraleverett.com/

Renita Martin is a celebrated visionary and interdisciplinary producing artist known for exceptional creativity, unparalleled talent, and unwavering commitment to social justice.

Her plays, including Five Bottles in a Six-Pack, Lo She Comes, and Blue Fire on the Water, have garnered international acclaim and premiered to sold-out audiences Renita’s numerous accolades such as the Fruitee Award for Outstanding Play, the National Performance Network's Creation Fund Grant, the 2021 Art Matters Foundation's Artist2Artist fellowship, and two Telly Awards, all testaments to her relentless commitment to equity.

Renita has also authored several publications, including IT IS THE SEEING, Rhythm Visions Never Do Be Finished, and Shotgun Wedding, and has contributed to notable collections such as Boston Theater Marathon Ten Minute Plays and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Writing.

She has held artist residencies at Brown University's Black Lavender Experience, Tougaloo College, the University of Mumbai, and the historic Cherry Lane Theatre.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Mentored by the incomparable Laurie Carlos, Renita is part of a glorious family of collaborating theatrical jazz practitioners that include Daniel Alexander Jones, Robbie McCauley, Djola Branner, Sharon Bridgforth, Clinton Turner-Davis, Dr. Darius Omar Williams, Florinda Bryant, Zell Miller, III, and many more.

As the CEO of Rhythm Visions Production Company, Renita is dedicated to providing cultural programs and employment opportunities to local communities. For her outstanding community service, she received Ebony Magazine's "Unsung Hero Award" and awards from Fenway Health Center, Boston Women's Service Club, and Eta Phi Beta Sorority.

Renita is privileged to be creating during these soul-defining times. www.renitamartin.com; IG @rerelynnet.

Zell Miller, III is an interdisciplinary theater artist based out of central Texas. He was inducted into the Arts Hall of Fame in 2017 for his work as a playwright, actor, director, and producer His one man show Chronicles of an Indigenous Offspring was nominated for 5 B. Iden Payne Awards. His oneman show Echo of a Refugee was nominated for a David Mark Cohen award in 2018. He is the writer / performer of My Child, My Child, My Alien Child (HydeParkTheater) that won the David Mark Cohen new play award for original new script. He was voted best est author/poet by the Austin Chronicle. He is writer/director for award winning shows Hands Up Hoodies Down, Ballot Eats the Bullet, Oh Snap… My Alien Children are Trying to Kill Me. Oh Snap… also won best show at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival. His one-man show The Evidence of Silence Broken (HydeParkTheater) won best touring show in Minneapolis, MN, and was published in Theater Communications Group anthology of Hip-Hop Theater: Plays from the Boom-box Galaxy. Zell has a feature broadcast with PBS Arts in Context: Oh Snap…My Alien Children are Trying to Kill Me, and was featured as "poet" with Tapestry Dance company for their national and international touring show The American Dream?

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Lisa C. Moore is the head of research services and cataloger at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans Prior to 2019, Moore was board president of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ writers of African descent. From 1997 to 2023 she was the publisher and editor of RedBone Press, which published award-winning literature by black gay men and lesbians RedBone Press authors included Samiya Bashir, Djola Branner, Sharon Bridgforth, Alexis De Veaux, Yvonne Onakeme Etaghene, Ernest Hardy, G. Winston James, AnaMaurine Lara, Other Countries and Marvin K. White. Moore has degrees from Catholic University (MLIS), University of Austin at Texas (MA, anthropology/African diaspora studies), Georgia State University (BA, print journalism) and Louisiana State University (BS, accounting). She is a member of the American Library Association, the Society of American Archivists, the Greater New Orleans Archivists, the Louisiana Archives and Manuscripts Association and the Society of Southwest Archivists.

Rayna Nakai (she/her) is an Actress, Singer, Dancer originally from Hampton, Virginia She is excited to collaborate with Jupiter Performance Studio as Teeny In The Name of The Mother Tree. She earned her MFA in Acting from Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University as well as BA in Drama and Theatre from Norfolk State University where is a proud HBCU Alumna. Rayna is interested in transformative storytelling centering on the experience of black women ’ s past, present, and future Previous roles include Tweet (Fancy Maids) and Camae (The Mountaintop). IG: @queenindian

kwe Ndosi is a Song Catcher, and Culture Worker sed in Minneapolis. Mankwe’s creative practice merges from black ritual legacies of music and erformance learned from and played with Douglas . Ewart, Laurie Carlos, Sharon Bridgforth, Amoke ubat, Nicole Mitchell, Miriam Makeba, the Give Get tet, Davu Seru, Tomeka Reid, Body mEmOri, ors, earth, and many peers across species, cultures, . She is a member of Chicago’s stalwart AACMCreative Musicians, and a Resident Community llsbury House + Theatre She applies creative and to grow emergent engagements of earth, sound, and regeneration.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Cynthia Oliver is a St. Croix, Virgin Island reared dance maker, performer and scholar. Her work incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She has toured the globe as a featured dancer with contemporary companies David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown / Evidence, Bebe Miller Company, and Tere O’Connor Dance and as an actor in works by Greg Tate, Ione, Ntozake Shange, Deke Weaver and Laurie Carlos. Cynthia performed in Carlos' Vanquished By Voodoo, her Bessie Award winning White Chocolate For My Father, and Ntozake Shange's A Photograph: Lovers In Motion which Carlos directed at St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre.

Cynthia earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is a Bessie Award winning choreographer, a 2016 Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Mellon Fellow, a 2017 University of Illinois Center for Advanced Studies Associate (and now CAS Professor), 2007 University Scholar awardee and a Gutgsell Endowed Professor. Formerly Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts and Related Fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a professor in the dance department with affiliations in African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, she is currently Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Arts Integration. Oliver is a widely published author with articles in a variety of journals and edited volumes. Her single authored book is titled, Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (2009). Her last evening-length performance work, “Virago-Man Dem” premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) Next Wave Festival 2017 and toured the country. She is a 2021 United States Artist, A 2021 Doris Duke Artist, and a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. www.cynthiaoliver.com; IG: @olicynt.

Priscilla Maria Page, PhD, is a writer, perform dramaturg, and faculty member in the Department o Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she also directs the Multicultural Theater Certificate. Her research includes Latinx Theater and Contemporary Native American Performance She is currently writing about Latinx theater history in Chicag

Her publications include “Crafting Latinx Culture on Chicago s Stages in the Routledge Companion to Latine Theater and Performance (2024); “Contextualizing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Hamilton Within Hip-Hop Theater History” in Hamilton, History, and Hip Hop: Essays on An American Musical (MacFarland, 2024); and “Collidescope 2 0: Performing the Alien Gaze” in Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative, edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks (Routledge, 2019). She co-edited and contributed to Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Responses with Joy Harjo, (Wesleyan Press, 2019). Her short essay titled “Our Dad is in Atlantis: Border Crossings as Latinx Theater Practice” appears on www.latinxtalk.org (March 2020). And her essay “My World Made Real” appears as the afterword in El Grito de Bronx and Other Plays by Migdalia Cruz (No Passport Press, 2010).

An accomplished actor/director/activist & educator, Sonja Parks has worked with such notable venues as The Public Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company-London, The Kennedy Center, Playwrights’ Horizon, The Wallis Annenberg Center-Beverly Hills, The Guthrie Theatre, Penumbra Theatre, Pillsbury House Theatre, & The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis

She trained at The University of Texas, The Dance Theater of Harlem & The National Black Theater under the direct tutelage of its founder, the late Dr. Barbara Ann Teer.

An original member of Doris Duke Fellow Sharon Bridgforth’s celebrated root wy ’ mn theatre company, she originated 2 one-woman shows, one of which was nominated for an Osborn Award by The American Theatre Critics Association. She has served on numerous artistic panels with individuals such as Kerry Kennedy of the Kennedy Center, journalist Nichola Kristoff, film producer Julius Tennon of JuVee Productions (a joint venture with his wife, Viola Davis), Swedish actor/director Josette Bushell-Mingo, & noted American theatre historian, Todd London.

As an arts activist, she has traveled to many parts of the world including Lagos, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; Berlin, Germany; Reykjavik, Iceland; Havana, Cuba; Cape Town, South Africa; and the Movement for Black Lives in Ferguson, MO.

She is an NEA Fellow; a McKnight Artist Fellow; a 2-time Minnesota State Arts Board Fellow; a 2-time Minneapolis Ivey Award winner; a TCG/Fox Distinguished Achievement Resident Acting Fellow; a

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

McCarter Theatre Center-Princeton/Sallie B. Goodman Artistic Fellow; a Kennedy Center Gold Medallion Award Recipient; has been a featured artist in Time Magazine and named “One to Watch” and one of “Seven Artists You Must See” by American Theatre Magazine.

She taught acting and theatre for eight years at The University of Minnesota/Twin Cities where she also conceived and spearhead the BA Mentoring program (now known as BAM)

She served as the Guest Artistic Director for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for 2 years and has been a teaching artist-in-residence at DePaul University/Chicago, Cornish College of the Arts/Seattle, and the University of Cape Town, South Africa www.sonjaparks.com

Megan Monaghan Rivas joined the University of Connecticut as Artistic Director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre and Department Head of Dramatic Arts in 2021 after serving as Interim Head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served on the faculty starting in 2013 In prior years she served as literary manager of South Coast Repertory Theatre, and as literary director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX. She oversaw the artistic programming for playwrights at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City and The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. She has freelanced with the New Harmony Project, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Geffen Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, Aurora Theatre, the Salt Lake Acting Company, TheatreSquared, Actors Express Theatre, and Horizon Theatre. She is the author of an original gender-bending adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and a separate original play riffing on Dumas’ characters set among women workers in the French Resistance, entitled Three Musketeers: 1941 Megan has been honored with the Elliott Hayes Prize in Dramaturgy. Photo credit: Louis Stein.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Regina Victor (they/pharaoh) is a nomadic multidisciplinary artist from Oakland, CA, based in Chicago IL Using the divinatory tools of tarot, storytelling, and the framework of theatrical jazz, they employ the blk and trans radical imagination to transmute the past, reflect the present, and cocreate possible futures. Theatre is their dominant actice,working most frequently as a director, actor. Victor is a producer for the Bombay Beach -traditional, radical hospitality interdisciplinary arts ornia. Pharaoh has developed new plays at The Playwrights Center, Long Wharf Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and more, and trained under prolific directors such as Daniel Alexander Jones, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Phylicia Rashad. Victor founded their arts criticism outlet, Rescripted.org, in 2017, and was placed in the ‘23 and ‘24 New City Magazine Hall of Fame for their work. As a freelance critic, Victor has written for The Chicago Reader, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, Howlround, and more. Pharaoh has piloted several cultural initiatives, including McCarter Theatre’s Bard at the Gate, UChicago’s Arts & Public Life Critics’ Table, the Howlround Theatre Commons’ National Advisory Council, and the Artistic Caucus. reginavictor.com Read their work at www.rescripted.org.

Talief U. Ticker is a multidisciplinary performing artist. He's an actor, writer and dancer who focuses on Afro Modern and West African Based movement He has been a theater artist since he was 16, starting out in Penumbra's Summer Institute. He wrote his first play What's The Question at 19 years old Talief has performed on multiple stages in the twin cities including Penumbra Theatre, Southern Theatre and The Whiting Theatre. He gained formal training at Penumbra Theatre, Catapult Acting Studio, TU Dance and Zenon Dance. Talief's goal is bringing Black and Brown Queer stories into the forefront of film and theatre.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

Margaret Werry is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota She is delighted to be partnering with Djola, Signe, Renita, Priscilla, and her colleagues at UMN, Tracey and Cindy, on this beautiful event!

When she is not organizing conferences or chairing an academic department, Margaret teaches courses on dramatic literature, new media, and performance history and theory She is a scholar of performance studies, and is the author of The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Theatre & Tourism (Bloomsbury, 2023), and numerous articles on pedagogy, immersive performance, Indigenous performance history and theory, museum display, interpretation, and ethics, and performance activism in the island Pacific. She is currently working on another project (The Performing Dead: Public Culture at the Borders of the Human) concerning the changing ways museums treat, trade, and display human remains.

Marvin K. White, MDiv, is currently the Full-Time Minister of Celebration at the historic Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, CA. He is a graduate of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA and the inaugural Public Theologian in Residence (’17-’18) at First Church Berkeley. Marvin is an ordained deacon at City of Refuge UCC. He was cofacilitator of the “Faith Leaders Round Table” at The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and was a recent recipient (’17-’18) of the YBCA Fellowship, “What Does Equity Look Like?”, a program that brought together creative citizens from across the Bay Area – artists and everyday people alike – to engage in a yearlong process of inquiry, dialogue, and project generation

He is the author of four collections of poetry published by RedBone Press: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the Lammy-nominated collections last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. His poetry has been anthologized in The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets; My Brothers Keeper; Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians: New Gay Writing; Things Shaped in Passing; Sojourner: Writing in the Age of AIDS; Bum Rush the Page; Role Call; and Think Again, as well as other local and national publications. He is the co-editor of If We Have to Take Tomorrow: HIV, Black Men & Same Sex Desire.

PRESENTERS + PERFORMERS

His poetry has been adapted for the stage at San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros and he has performed his own work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as a part of their 2014 BAN7 Festival As a former member of the critically acclaimed theater troupe Pomo Afro Homos, he has performed nationally and internationally.

Beginning as a Teaching Artist for WritersCorps, he continues to lead creative arts and writing workshops for a range of audiences, from youth centers for runaway kids to black gay support groups to literary conferences, faith communities, and social justice organizations.

White is co-founder of B/GLAM (Black Gay Letters and Arts Movement), a Bay Area, California organization whose goal was to preserve, present and incubate black gay artistic expressions. He is a graduate of the national African-American poetry fellowship and organization, Cave Canem; and sat on the board of Fire & Ink, a national black LGBT writer’s organization. A public theologian and community-based artist, he is articulating a vision of social, prophetic and creative justice through his work as a poet, artist, teacher, facilitator, activist, community organizer, preacher, homemaker, cake baker, and Facebook Statistician

Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (they/them) is an international multiple award-winning transgender artist and futurist, noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time "Bessie" Awardee who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, a forthcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum, and manuscript Whitson is a sought-after speaker, consultant, presenter, and masterclass facilitator, whose offerings have been shared among notable institutions and arts organizations: Princeton, Cornell, LAX Festival, Movement Research, 2020 keynote of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance conference, and UNESCO.

s is a playwright, director and dramaturg Minneapolis and New York City. His plays od, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Heaven, An American Triptych, Jimmy and A Musing, and As I Remember It with de Lavallade. He is a co-writer / co-director hong’s ongoing series of Undesirable d Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and member of the Ping Chong + Co. Artistic Credits: The White Card, This Bitter Earth, of Emmett Till (Penumbra Theatre), The ack Theatre/Woolly Mammoth), Parks : A Viper Vaudeville (HERE Arts/La Mama), atre Company) and The Till Trilogy (Mosaic its: for colored girls who have considered is enough (2022 Broadway Revival), York Theatre Workshop/National Black (Children’s Theatre Company), Between the ( p o), Scat!, Walkin’ with ‘Trane, Haint Blu (Urban Bush Women), ink, Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Mr. TOL E. RanCE (Camille A Brown and Dancers), In a Rhythm, A History, Necessary Beauty, Landing-Place, Verge (Bebe Miller Company), Radicals in Miniature, Relics and Their Humans (Ain Gordon/Pick Up Performance Co ) He is an Associate Professor in the Theatre Arts and Dance Department, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities and is a 2020 McKnight Theater Artist Fellow and a 2022 McKnight Presidential Fellow. He was a researcher/co-curator/dramaturg for the Sekou Sundiata Retrospective, Blink Your Eyes, the Aunt Ester Cycle at the August Wilson Center, and continues research on the ongoing book project, Testament: 40 Years of Black Theatre History in the Making, 1964-2004.

Appreciation for...

Daniel Alexander Jones + Eleanor Savage + Maija García + Davu

Underwood Seru + Meigan Reichart + Rohan Preston + Talvin Wilks + Andrea Stephens + T Mychael Rambo + Melba Davis + Jessica Lopez Lyman + Emma Brunette Stuttgen + UMN Theater Arts and Dance Staff + Institute for Advanced Study staff + Dean Josephine Lee + our sponsors Mixed Blood Theater + Pangea World Theater + our amazing videographers Nicco Berry (aka Mister Foolie) + Yalan Sesay + a small army of volunteers + all the brilliant presenters and performers who said ‘Yes!’ to celebrating and extending the legacy of theatrical jazz.

Rarig Centre Staff

Emily Grodzik + Bill Healey + Sharon Kimes + Millie Reid Rivera + Jason Allyn-Schwerin

LANDACKNOWLEDGEMENT

WeacknowledgethattheUniversityofMinnesotaTwinCitiesisbuilt withinthetraditionalhomelandsoftheDakotapeople.Itisimportant toacknowledgethepeoplesonwhoselandwelive,learn,andworkas weseektoimproveandstrengthenourrelationswithourtribal nations.Wealsoacknowledgethatwordsarenotenough.Wemust ensurethatourinstitutionprovidessupport,resources,andprograms thatincreaseaccesstoallaspectsofhighereducationforour AmericanIndianstudents,staff,faculty,andcommunitymembers.

Laurie Carlos

What if we were Life/ or Liberty/ or the Pursuit of something new?/

And what if we were composed by Love?

Sekou Sundiata

Scan here for our Linktree. Full bios and photo credits can be found in the digital program.