Hush Harbor Lab seeks to nurture Black artists

By Dyana Bagby

When enslaved African Americans finished a day of hard labor, they would often use hand signs, passwords and messages not understood by white people to signal to others where to meet deep in the nearby woods. These meeting pockets, surrounded by trees and far away from the reality of slavery, were known as “hush harbors.”

“In the antebellum era of enslavement, many enslaved people, after they worked from sunup to sundown, needed to find a place where they could just be free, where they could express themselves without a white gaze upon them,” said Addae Moon, associate artistic director at Theatrical Outfit.

“They went into these ‘hush harbors’ to perform their traditional spiritual practices, they would sing, they would praise and rejoice,” Moon said. “It was a way for them to really stay sane in such a hostile environment that chattel slavery in America was.”

It is in this tradition that Moon and Amina S. McIntyre, both Atlanta-based playwrights, founded Hush Harbor Lab in early 2020. The company is an incubator for the development and production of new and innovative digital, live, and multimedia performance work by Black Atlanta- based artists.

“Hush Harbor was really founded to be a new play development program, but also a company that focused on assisting Black Atlanta based writers and giving them the opportunity to explore and develop their work,” Moon said.