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REVIEW: The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano

Continuing Recital’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, we are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2021 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is our review of The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano by Tlaloc Rivas, a collaborative response from Recital editor David Bernabo and guest panelists Jason Baldinger, Ariel Xiu, and Vanessa Reseland. Read their bios at the end of the review.

Review: Energizing, vibrant, and potent, ‘The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano’ closes out the CSA season on a high note

By David Bernabo

Energizing, vibrant, and potent, The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano closes out the eighth season of the New Hazlett Theater’s CSA performance series in grand fashion. Presented as a workshop performance and based on Sonia Manzano’s book of the same name, Tlaloc Rivas’s play presents a fictionalized look at the emergence of the Young Lords in East Harlem in 1969 as told through the eyes of 14-year old Evelyn. The cast is impressive, taking on multiple roles, frequently picking up instruments and breaking into song as they chart the radicalization of Evelyn and her friends during a dynamic period of change in American history. Despite it’s “workshop” status, the performance is slick, the songs feel alive, and the calls for revolution, improving one’s community, and tearing down oppressive systems are still vital.

The year is 1979. The stage depicts a radio station where a group re-enacts two sets of events: the Young Lords’ East Harlem Garbage Offensive in the summer of 1969 and the 11-day occupation of the First Spanish Methodist Church and it’s reinvention as the People’s Church. The Young Lords emerged in the late 60s in Chicago and quickly formed chapters in New York and places along the east and west coasts. Modeled after the Black Panthers, the Young Lords were a civil and human rights organization that advocated for Puerto Rican independence and self-determination as well as neighborhood empowerment. To that end, the group set up free breakfast programs and education opportunities. Evelyn’s (Carolina Campos) story and her evolving relationships with her friends, her strict but caring mother (Jade Langan), and her recently arrived and fiercely radical grandmother (Kelsey Robinson) thread these historical events together with an engaging and intimate personal narrative.

East Harlem in the hot summer of 1969 smells like basuda or trash according to Evelyn. Her mother justifies their living there by mentioning two entities that she blames for ruining the potential of Puerto Rico — crooked politicians and selfish radicals. People know Evelyn as Maria or Rosa, but with budding personal agency, she decides to call herself Evelyn, her second middle name. Evelyn begins a part-time job at the five and dime where she meets Abuela, her grandmother, a soon-to-be catalyst in Evelyn’s evolving political interests. Before knowing about, let alone joining the Young Lords, Evelyn veers between advocating for personal responsibility and leaping into the unknown. Early in the play, Evelyn channels her mother when berating a friend for his lack of responsibility to work and family — “do you want to be like the glue sniffers and bums?” But after learning about the Young Lords’ mission, Evelyn feels like she is “wearing a new pair of glasses.”

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

Pittsburgh Playwright Explores Puerto Rican Identity Through The Eyes Of A Teenager

By Bill O’Driscoll

You might not have heard of the Young Lords, but they were big news in New York City in the the summer of 1969. Inspired by the Black Panthers, this group of Puerto Rican activists protested poor garbage collection in their community by setting a huge pile of trash on fire on First Avenue, in the East Harlem neighborhood known as El Barrio. Among other actions, they later occupied a church and even a hospital in an effort to get more resources for their community. And they were outspoken advocates of self-determination for Puerto Rico, then as now an unincorporated U.S. territory.

That summer was a flashpoint for the growing Puerto Rican identity movement, preceding even widespread use of the term “Nuyorican.” It’s also the historical backdrop for “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano,” a young-adult novel by Sonia Manzano published in 2014. Not long after, the story about a Puerto Rican teenager struck a chord with Tlaloc Rivas, a playwright and theater artist who grew up in California with parents involved in the Chicano-rights movement.

Rivas’ stage adaptation of the book premieres this week in a virtual production, part of the New Hazlett Theater’s Community Supported Art series.

“This play shows that you can, at any age, at a very young age, have a voice, and you have the power to engage in protesting for what you want and what you believe in, to make the world a better place,” said Rivas, who lives in Pittsburgh and has stage credits around the country.

Rivas also directs the show. Evelyn is played by Carolina Campos, one of six Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama students in the cast, which also includes veteran local performers Kelsey Robinson and Ricardo Vila-Roger. The show incorporates five original songs, with lyrics by Rivas.

The story broadly follows the debut novel by Manzano, known to generations of kids as “Maria” on Sesame Street. Tlaloc, who often consulted Manzano about his stage adaptation, said that while the novel’s story is fictional, it draws on elements of autobiography from Manzano, who is Puerto Rican and grew up in the South Bronx, and a cousin of hers who lived in El Barrio.

Rivas is a recent Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama who came to Pittsburgh in 2018. His career has long blended theater with community engagement and social activism. His plays including “Take What You Can Carry,” “Diversadero,” “Johanna: Facing Forward,” and “Byzantine” have been staged at theaters nationally. Rivas is a co-founder of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and producer of the series The Latinx Superfriends Playwriting Hour, on HowlRound.com. His other Pittsburgh credit was co-directing “Peribanez” for Quantum Theatre in 2016 with his wife, Megan Monaghan Rivas, interim head of CMU’s School of Drama.

For “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano,” Rivas said he was most intrigued by how the family dynamics in the book intersected with society at large. “What really caught my attention was it was really about three generations of Puerto Rican women, each with their own viewpoints about the world, and how quickly change can happen, socially, politically and personally,” he said.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

‘The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano’ explores Puerto Rican heritage at New Hazlett Theater

By Tyler Dague

A group of young people put together a pirate radio station in the heart of El Barrio, East Harlem, in 1979. In the studio, they come together to act, sing and celebrate a story of a decade earlier with a 14-year-old girl at the center.

The novel “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano” is now a filmed play premiering Thursday on smart devices from the New Hazlett Theater on the North Side. The shows are at 8 p.m. Thursday and 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Friday. Tickets are pay as you like at newhazletttheater.org.

Adapted from the young adult novel by Sonia Manzano (best known for playing Maria on “Sesame Street”), the filmed radio play was written and directed by Tlaloc Rivas as part of the New Hazlett’s Community Supported Art series.

The story focuses on three generations of Puerto Rican women in 1969, and its centerpiece is the feisty and inquisitive Evelyn. Each woman deals with urban life in different ways as the organized protests of Nuyorican activists call attention to the problems of structural inequality in New York City.

Rivas, a longtime director who was an inaugural Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, became interested in the activists the Young Lords and the powerful social movements they spurred. Then he discovered Manzano’s novel that addressed this era for younger audiences. He noted that other events that year such as the Stonewall riots, the Woodstock music festival and the Apollo moon landing are well-remembered nationally, but the 50th anniversary of the Young Lords’ uprising in Harlem received little attention.

Wanting to adapt the novel for the stage, Rivas connected with the author through an old friend, Emilio Delgado, who played Luis alongside Manzano on “Sesame Street.”

Lingering limitations due to the pandemic forced him to stretch his creativity in staging “Evelyn Serrano,” but rescheduling also allowed him to assemble a cast composed of actors of color from Carnegie Mellon University.

“One of the cast members, and she’s a rising junior at Carnegie Mellon, said that this was the first time she’s ever played a character of her same background and ethnicity as a Latina,” he said. “They’re young actors, and they don’t often have the opportunity to play someone of their own age and cultural background. I was just really touched by that.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

PREVIEW: The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano

An Interview with Tlaloc Rivas about “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano”

By David Bernabo

To close the eighth season of the New Hazlett Theater’s CSA series, Tlaloc Rivas will present a workshop version of his play The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, based on Sonia Manzano’s 2012 novel of the same name.

There are three performances on June 10 and 11. Get your tickets here.

In The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, young Evelyn is keeping two secrets from her family — her true feelings about growing up in Spanish Harlem, and her attitude about Abuela, her larger-than-life grandmother who’s come from Puerto Rico to live with them. Then as sudden as an earthquake, events erupt that change everything: the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group, ignite garbage fires to protest the city’s failure to provide basic sanitation and other services to their neighborhood. This revolutionary act brings a new spirit of pride and resistance. Evelyn learns important truths about her Latinx identity, and the history-makers who shaped the Nuyorican identity forever.

Check out our interview with Tlaloc below! [This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]

David Bernabo: I saw that The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano is being presented as a workshop. Can you explain what that means for the upcoming virtual performances at New Hazlett Theater?

Tlaloc Rivas: This is the second iteration of this play. In a way it’s less of an adaptation and more of a “based on.” When I first developed what I’m going to call the first version — a true to the original source adaptation — we did a presentation that had 24 actors. I knew that nobody would want to produce a show with 24 actors, but it was a way for me to figure out what the heart of the story was. One of the great things that came out of that was that Sonia Manzano [author of the book The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano], who went to Carnegie Mellon in the 60s, came to the reading and gave me really incredible feedback. But the most important piece of it was, you don’t have to do everything that’s in the book. Do your version of this book. So, I preceded to do that.

In the midst of that and getting accepted in the CSA, COVID happened. As an artist, I do appreciate limitations. I had to think of a conceit to not only workshop the play, but also present it. I gave myself the challenge of writing essentially a new play from what I remembered from the book. I did not look at the novel or my previous draft. I just wrote what felt most important to me. That’s what we have right now.

In addition to that, the conceit was also to have seven actors play all the different roles of the characters in the book. So, what you are going to see is a very paired down, very different take from the source material, with the addition of original songs that speak to a time where protest music from the Civil Rights Movement would also play a part in what we are calling the evolution of Evelyn’s social consciousness in a world that is divided by race and class.

The reason it is a workshop is because it is the first time that I’ll be seeing this piece fully realized as a writer and director. I have no interest in directing it beyond this. I really want to see other folks put their creative vision behind it, because that’s the fun of being a writer. You get to see different versions of it.

DB: Given your rewrite of the original version, what’s the synopsis of the current version?

TR: Evelyn Serrano, a young Puerto Rican girl is trying to forge her identity when her grandmother from Puerto Rico arrives and brings her very progressive and revolutionary ideas to the forefront of her consciousness. Evelyn’s mother, who is very conservative and apolitical, wants Evelyn to lead a life that will provide for their family. Enter the Young Lords — this is a Puerto Rican version of the Black Panthers — who emerged in 1969 to raise consciousness of the Puerto Rican people and to fight for social services that they’re not getting in East Harlem, which included healthcare, nutritional services, education, housing, and other services like testing children for lead poisoning and tuberculosis.

They took on confrontational tactics. New York City Sanitation was not picking up their garbage regularly, so they organized a garbage offensive. They took all the trash that hadn’t been collected in the past month, put it in the middle of Lexington Avenue, and set it on fire. So, that got the attention of everybody.

The play really centers on Evelyn, who is part of a congregation where the Young Lords take over a church to start their breakfast programs and nutritional services. They occupied a church in East Harlem for two weeks, and the play takes place in memory and in the present as Evelyn recounts her time being with the Young Lords and how she was influenced by them.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

REVIEW: Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket

Continuing Recital’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, we are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2021 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is our review of Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket by Dr. HollyHood and Jon Quest, a collaborative response from Recital editor David Bernabo and guest panelists Jason Baldinger, Ariel Xiu, and Vanessa Reseland. Read their bios at the end of the review.

Review: A Love Triangle Dissolves in ‘Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket’

By David Bernabo

In Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket, hip hop artists Dr. HollyHood and Jon Quest boldly stitch together each of their latest solo albums to present a consolidated tale of deceit, ruined love, and near redemption. Billed as a “hip hopera,” the song-based sections soar, pairing elegant rhymes and strong flow with interesting production that spans classic and contemporary eras. Given the requirement of a virtual performance, there’s also a willingness to experiment by including filmed music videos and split screen segments. Despite the ambitions, the performance tends to lag at points due to unpolished, somewhat indifferent acting and a script that doesn’t allow the characters to transform within the duration of the performance. For a work about people managing different types of love, there is little chemistry between the performers, which is made clearer when the performers truly groove in their respective solo settings.

Before the pandemic, in 2019, Dr. HollyHood aka Dr. Amber Epps and Jon Quest aka Jonathan Brown each released solo albums. Dr. Hollyhood’s Yellow Jacket charts the timeline of a woman’s relationship with a married man while Jon Quest’s Hollywood Divorce tells a similar story, but from a male point of view as the narrator fuels the disintegration of both a marriage and an extramarital relationship. For Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket, Epps and Brown merge the two records into one linear narrative, placing Amber and Jon in a budding relationship while Jon’s wife, Tori, grows more suspicious and reasonably enraged as the performance builds to a violent climax.

Jon and Tori (Dominique Brock).

Whether on screen, stage, or page, the love triangle is a well-known storytelling device. The Bible has a unique love triangle with Jacob being tricked into marrying Leah, despite his love for her sister, Rachel; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night mixes things up with disguised identities; Harold Pintor based the play Betrayal on his affair with reporter Joan Bakewell, much to her chagrin; and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It ups the ante with it’s love quadrangle. Since the public generally understands the love triangle concept and can anticipate possible outcomes, the impact of this type of story really comes down to the execution of the work.

The best things about Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket are the song sequences. Amber and Jon, as characters, come to life when rapping (mostly pre-recorded tracks, though the spoken word sections are also really effective.) There’s swagger, elegant flows full of barbed phrases, and an ease of delivery. You get to know these characters through their rhymes. You hear their passion, their confusion, their disgust, and their desires.

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

PREVIEW: Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket

Recital continues our partnership with the New Hazlett Theater by publishing a preview and an editorially-independent review for the five performances in the 2021 CSA Performance Series season. Throughout the season, Recital is meeting with each of the artists to bring you a brief profile of them and their work in the days before their opening performance. We will publish a considered review for each performance, developed from post-show discussions with a consistent panel of local experts in related disciplines.

Dr. HollyHood and Jon Quest combine forces with Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket

By David Bernabo

When we think of two albums existing in the same space, the brain immediately goes to the mashup record. You probably know about The Grey Album from producer Danger Mouse, which mashes together Jay-Z’s vocals from The Black Album and The Beatles’ The Beatles aka The White Album. Jay-Z, again, is paired with Radiohead in Max Tannone’s Jaydiohead mash-up. The Notorious xx = The Notorious B.I.G. with indie band The xx. Wugazi = Wu-Tang and Fugazi.

On the local scene, hometown hero Gregg Gillis moved on from smashing TVs in The Joysticks to mashing together Lil Wayne and Sinead O’Connor (among hundreds of other samples) as Girl Talk.

These more modern iterations built on folks like John Cage sampling live radio programs, DJ Kool Herc looping breakbeats from soul and funk records, and John Oswald’s plunderphonics.

One could argue that the medley was an earlier form of the mash-up. See Marvin Gaye revisiting younger days, and The Spinners paying tribute to peers, forbearers, and thieves. On wax, there’s Side B of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, and Harry Nilsson anticipating mega-mash efforts like “40 Years of Hip Hop” by peppering a different Beatles song into every line of his cover of “You Can’t Do That.”

And if we are including medleys in this lineage, well, let’s go back even further and give a shout out to the overture — those introductory orchestral pieces that sample musical elements from the opera or ballet that you’re about to hear.

Ok, I’m straying from the point, getting too loose with definitions, and definitely getting link happy, but the general idea is that the medley pairs like-minded things while the mashup can smash together seemingly opposing forces.

Quest and the Girl with the Yellow Jacket is neither a mashup or a medley, but a third approach to mixing and matching two recordings. In this new “Hip Hopera,” musicians Dr. Amber Epps aka Dr. HollyHood and Jonathan Brown aka Jon Quest use songs from their respective 2019 solo albums as the foundation for an interdisciplinary love story, one that combines music, video, and skits.

(The production is part of the New Hazlett Theater’s CSA performance series. There are three virtual performances on May 20th and 21st. Get (free) tickets here.)

Epps and Brown met a while ago at the now-closed Shadow Lounge venue in East Liberty. “I knew Jon from Shadow Lounge, from an event called Rhyme Calisthenics,” says Epps. “It was my favorite event — a hip hop game show. Jon was really good at it. You have to be able to freestyle.”

Both Epps and Brown have been making music for a while. Epps is known as the “mom of hip hop” in Pittsburgh, getting opening spots for KRS-One, Rakim, and GZA. Epps is also a member of the #notwhite collective. “We do spoken word, song, visual arts — all things that basically say, We don’t fuck with white supremacy.” In addition to a string a solo albums, Brown performed in Varsity Squad with emcee Beedie.

“We had seen each other at events over the years,” continues Epps. “[In 2019], I told him that I was putting out my project, telling him what it was about. And he was like, seriously, well, I’m working on a project, too. I’m like, how are we both putting out projects that have similar themes but from different perspectives. Our lives seemed destined to collide — like we were going to yoga together and now he’s one of my BFFs.”

Squeezing 11 tracks into 16 minutes, HollyHood’s Yellow Jacket (2019) combines spoken word and a mix of contemporary and old school beats to tell the story of a woman in a relationship with a married man. “In my story, I’m the side chick,” says Epps. “But in my situation, it wasn’t just being a side chick, it was an actual emotional relationship. It was like, that was my boyfriend.”

Jon Quest’s Hollywood Divorce (2019) walks similar territory, but focuses more on the disintegration of a marriage.

“My album is about a man going through his marriage and, ultimately, a divorce,” says Brown. “Throughout the album, I tried to highlight the importance of mental health , going through therapy and discovering that I had these traumas and things that I need to work through. I tried to put that all in the album. Yes, I was wrong for what I did and a lot of crazy situations, but also I’m a human. I might not have grown up the right way. Let me dig deeper into myself to see how I can impact these issues.”

“While our stories overlap, they aren’t the same,” says Epps. “So, we wrote a script. I wrote the first script, but it was the relationship from my perspective. Then, Jon would change lines to sound more like his situation. We had to figure out how to make the story reflective of both of our stories.”

To do that, Epps and Brown picked songs from each of their records, recorded new skits to tie things together, and filmed two new music videos with Jordan Beckham that will be integrated into the performance. Dramaturg TJ Young is also on board to bring these stories out of the headphones and up onto the stage.

READ THE FULL PREVIEW HERE

NEA doles out $190K in grants to Pittsburgh arts organizations

By Joshua Axelrod

Plenty of Pittsburgh-area arts organizations received a funding boost today from the National Endowment for the Arts in its second round of grant handouts this year.

The Washington, D.C.-based NEA on Tuesday announced “$88 million in recommended grants to organizations in all 50 states and jurisdictions,” according to its news release.

“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations re-engage fully with partners and audiences,” Ann Eilers, NEA’s acting chairman, said in a press release.

“While the arts, whether through books, movies or online performances and programs, have been a sustaining force for many throughout the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

NEA gave out grants to Pennsylvania organizations based in Pittsburgh, Annville, Bethlehem, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Reading, Scranton and State College. Pittsburgh organizations received $190,000 in total of NEA funding. They included:

  • $50,000 to Bridgeway Capital, Inc
  • $25,000 to Film Pittsburgh
  • $35,000 to the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council
  • $15,000 to the New Hazlett Center for the Performing Arts
  • $10,000 to Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures
  • $20,000 to Pittsburgh Glass Center, Inc.
  • $20,000 to Contemporary Craft
  • $15,000 to Squonk Opera, Inc.

With the exception of Bridgeway Capital’s allocation, all the grants those organizations will receive fell under the category of “grants for art projects.” The NEA approved more than $27 million in funding for 1,172 of those kinds of projects for this grant cycle, according to its press release.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

REVIEW: Sunsum is Spirit

Continuing Recital’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, we are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2021 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is our review of Sunsum is Spirit by Samuel Boateng, a collaborative response from Recital editor David Bernabo and guest panelists Jason Baldinger and Vanessa Reseland. Read their bios at the end of the review.

What Lies at the Edge of Beauty?

‘Sunsum is Spirit’ is a potent, kaleidoscopic ride through sound, movement, and image

By David Bernabo

With Sunsum is Spirit, Samuel Boateng crafts a kaleidoscopic interdisciplinary work that is in constant movement. The eye follows colorful visual patterns from the painted floor to the beautifully-patterned costumes to the tightly-mapped projections. Dancers draw journeys on the stage, constantly unfolding different configurations while working within traditional and contemporary movement languages, responding to the warm sounds of the band, itself deeply entrenched in polyrhythmic play. The plot, complete with a few twists, is the connective tissue for these set pieces. Balancing abstraction and concreteness, an argument for a more equitable world (or at least, village) unfolds. It’s an idea that is mirrored in the execution of the performance. With so many elements, there is risk of competition, that certain actions would be wasted or overshadowed by other concurrent elements, but Boateng and his team ensure that there is no hierarchy between music, movement, story, and visuals. All these elements work in harmony.

In addition to Robinson’s occasional exposition, music guides us through this journey. There’s rolling hand-percussion, sweet bass runs, and deep piano chords. There’s uplifting highlife guitar lines and horn jabs with rhythms that you need to catch in your body. Developments in jazz in the late 60s — the loosening of forms, the integration with gospel, soul, and funk, the heavy spiritualism — are very present in much of the score. Fans of Idris Muhammad, Roy Ayers, Kelan Phil Cochran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, or Mwandishi will certainly feel at home with this performance.
Music introduces each scene. It accompanies the preparations for the journey as the travelers sing out their strengths and qualifications. “If you want fresh meat, I will give you three. I’ll be real, real strong. I don’t fear no one.” Music accompanies dream and nightmare sequences — sometimes giving the band a place to stretch out with solos, other times opting for something more abstract.

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

REVIEW: Milton

Continuing Recital’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, we are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2021 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is our review of Milton by Kaylin Horgan, a collaborative response from Recital editor David Bernabo and guest panelists Jason Baldinger and Gigi Gatewood. Read their bios at the end of the review, and read our preview of the performance here.

Kaylin Horgan Brings the Life of Milton Raiford to the Big (Virtual) Stage in Style

By David Bernabo

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

PREVIEW: Sunsum is Spirit

Recital continues our partnership with the New Hazlett Theater by publishing a preview and an editorially-independent review for the five performances in the 2021 CSA Performance Series season.  Throughout the season, Recital is meeting with each of the artists to bring you a brief profile of them and their work in the days before their opening performance. We will publish a considered review for each performance, developed from post-show discussions with a consistent panel of local experts in related disciplines.

PREVIEW: Pianist Samuel Boateng dives into the traditional, the supernatural, and the urgent on ‘Sunsum is Spirit’

By David Bernabo

Samuel Boateng wants to re-imagine how stories about Africa are told, not only the content, but also the delivery. His new interdisciplinary work Sunsum is Spirit merges music, dance, storytelling, and video projection to provide a different ending for a commonly-told — read: stereotypical — story about Africa and the slave trade. Director Kelsey Wooley Jumper and choreographer Chrisala Brown alongside a cast of exemplary local musicians and dancers are on board to guide this collaborative, surrealistic production as it explores West African tradition, mythology, and migration.

“When people think of Africa in the 1700s and the 1800s, which is the general broader period that we are trying to situate this fictional story, they assume enslavement and kidnappings and war and famine,” says Boateng. “We’re not denying the fact that in reality these things occurred; however, that is not the end of the story.”
In Boateng’s production, we are introduced to three characters. They are tasked by their local elders to find a cure for a disease. On their travels to find the cure, they become aware of a deception. Their leaders had planned to sell them into the system of slavery.

“We’re imagining a retelling of the story where people that were supposed to be part of the slave trading process find redemption,” says Boateng. “Through a very deep, creative, spiritual process, they find a knowledge that allows them to resist that stereotypical story. They become our heroes, they become our examples, and they become our new leaders for the next generation. So, we’re saying, no, the story doesn’t have to end there, and even if it did end there, we still have the right to take these stories and reimagine better endings.”

Sunsum is Spirit can serve different purposes for different people in different places, especially now that COVID-19 has shifted this Pittsburgh performance to an international one via New Hazlett Theater’s free virtual screening. (Get tickets for the April 29 and 30 performances here.)

READ THE FULL PREVIEW HERE

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