OnStage@Weeksville Presents: free/conjure/black: A Digital Liberation Salon with Host Ebony Noelle Golden, 6/28

[Image Description: Weeksville logo, which is comprised of a gold old stamp like circle, in which a “W” in white is central. Underneath is the text “WEEKSVILLE HERITAGE CENTER” also in gold]

Saturday, June 28

free/conjure/black is a communal mediation, a spirit-sourced intervention, a virtual ring shout calling forth a perpetual and inevitable through- line of prismatic black freedom. free/conjure/black centers the rich legacy of the Weeksville community and movements for black sovereignty in the United States.

Join our Coalition of Theaters of Color, Artist in Residence, creator, curator, moderator, and founder/CEO of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Ebony Noelle Golden, on Sunday, June 28th from 11:30AM-4:30PM, for an afternoon of creative experiments and ideas featuring artists, scholars, and cultural organizers who are actively advancing the movement for black freedom now.

About the Team

Creator, Curator, Moderator

Ebony Noelle Golden is an artist, scholar, and culture strategist from Houston, TX and currently based in Harlem.  She devises site-specific ceremonies, live art installations, creative collaborations, and arts experiments that explore and radically imagine viable strategies for collective black liberation.  In 2020, Ebony launched Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS) which serves as a hub for the study of diasporic black performance traditions.  JPS is integral to the development of a five-part theatrical ceremony that will be developed and produced over the next three years with partners in Harlem, Brooklyn, Durham, and Ashfield, Massachusetts.  In 2009, Ebony founded Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy and arts accelerator, that devises systems, strategies, solutions for and with education, arts, culture, and community groups globally.  Golden’s current projects include: Jubilee 11213 (in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and generously supported by Creative Capital, Coalition of Theaters of Color, and Black Spatial Relics), freedom/conjure/black, and In The Name Of (commissioned by Apollo Theatre and generously supported by Double Edge Theatre, Toshi Reagon, Network of Ensemble Theatres and Hi-Arts). 

Instagram: @ebonynoellegolden

Twitter: @bettysdaughter1

Web: bettysdaughterarts.com

Artists

Paris Cymone is an actor/singer/dancer hailing from Harlem, New York. Her credits include: The Fire This Time Festival '20, In The Name Of (The Shed), 125th and Freedom (National Black Theatre), Funnyhouse of a Negro (Lenfest Center for the Arts), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (LCFA). Training: Stella Adler Studio of Acting, BADA. Paris is grateful to be working on this project and giving a voice to her community. Instagram: misspareebaby 

Angela Davis Johnson is a dreamer and storyteller. She creates paintings, collaborative public art installations, and ritual performances to examine the technologies of Black people, in particular Black women/femmes. Davis Johnson explores language, sound and incorporates body movement alongside her vibrant narrative paintings. Her works are portraits created with paint, scrap paper, found objects, hollering, humming, light and fabric. Davis Johnson is a member of Alternate Roots and was selected into their cohort of Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Scholars in 2015. She is co-creator of Hollerin Space, an ongoing interactive installation that was held in North Carolina, Detroit, and at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Davis Johnson’s performances have taken place in a variety of locations-- from  front porches to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and was recently included in Miami Art Week and reviewed in the NY Times.  Born in Orlando, FL, Davis Johnson grew up in an artistic and military family. She lived and traveled throughout the United States and has deep roots in the Arkansas Delta. As the mother of two continues to migrate, she maintains a studio in Atlanta, GA. https://www.angeladavisjohnson.com/ 

There is magic, reverence and mystery in the spaces, objects and writings of Viktor le. Givens, a multimodal performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to re-contextualize the seemingly mundane into the spectacularly sacred. Though the form is different, Givens’ work is a continuation and adaptation of the methods used by storytellers like Hurston and Morrison who find truth in their bodies and use the whispers of archeological sites to piece together  Afro-Atlantic pasts. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with precolonial and postmodern spiritual technologies, Givens works to fabricate spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory. http://www.southernandroid.com/ 

Graceson Rafael Abreu Nunez

If there is any hope for the future of art it is through the means of creation. As long as there are those who are creating no matter the size or scale of their work then I believe the practice we know as art will continue to propel forward. The formative development of my artistry begins with my work at New York Theatre Workshop. A young intern there, I was first exposed to new work which planted the seed with my artistry stems from. No longer watching staged readings, my time at Boston University gave me the opportunity to perform in new works that were fully produced and now have premiered Off-Broadway. During my time at university, six months of my education was spent working with Double Edge Theatre, a site-specific, ensemble-based theatre in Western Massachusetts as an apprentice. My own undergraduate thesis comprised of a devised performance in which me and six other creators produced an interdisciplinary piece, incorporating film, dance, and live music. As a theatre artist whose mediums lie in performance and dramaturgy my experience has taught me to believe in process and experience artistry in multiple roles. https://gracesonabreu.com/

Monét Noelle Marshall is a Durham, North Carolina-based artist, director, producer and creative consultant. She serves as the Founding Artistic Director of MOJOAA Performing Arts Company, producing new works and new opportunities for Black playwrights. http://www.monetnoellemarshall.com/

Freddie Fulton (Storyteller) is originally from Little Rock, Arkansas and a graduate of the MFA (Acting) program at Columbia University. Theatre credits include: Long Wharf Theatre’s Paradise Blue (P-Sam), Classic Stage Company’s Julius Caesar (Brutus), Virginia Stage Company’s Detroit ’67 (Sly), Too Heavy for Your Pocket (Bowzie), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (Black Man with Watermelon), A Soldier’s Play (PFC Peterson), and others. To his family, friends, and supporters (new and old) thank you for your inspiration and love, it means the world to him.

Presenters

Arielle Julia Brown is a creative producer, cultural strategist, performance maker and dramaturg. She is the founder of The Love Balm Project (2010-2014). She is also the founder and director of Black Spatial Relics, a new performance residency about slavery, justice and freedom. Arielle is a co-creative producer on Remember2019, a performance and residency project based in Phillips County, Arkansas. She received her B.A. from Pomona College and was the 2015-2017 graduate fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University where she received an M.A. in Public Humanities. Learn more about her work here. https://www.ariellejuliabrown.com/

Michelle Lanier is a Documentary Doula, helping makers birth films. She has served on the faculty of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University since 2000. Michelle uses her background as an oral historian and folklorist to connect communities around personal narratives and cultural expression. She has traveled to Panama and Ghana to document African Diaspora funerary traditions, and her ethnographic work in a South Carolina Gullah community led to her role as a liaison to the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Growing up in a family that includes veterans of five American wars has inspired her current work in training students to collect veterans’ narratives through a Service-Learning course. In 2008, Michelle successfully advocated for legislation creating the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which she led as its founding executive director. As a seasoned public humanities and museum professional, in 2018, Michelle was named as the first African American director of all of North Carolina's 25 state-owned historic sites. Michelle is also a proud founding member, along with her daughter Eden, of a multi-media and multi-modal coalition called DOADA, the Documentarians of African Descent Alliance. http://www.mossvilleproject.com/team

Dr. J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana Studies in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, ecologies, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia. Follow him on Twitter @JTRoane.

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and an Associate Director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development at Texas A&M University. She is also the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com, a research and social justice initiative documenting placemaking history and grassroots preservation practices in the African Diaspora. Dr. Roberts brings more than a decade of experience in community and economic development to her scholarship. As a planning historian, theorist, critical heritage scholar, and educator, Roberts trains future planners and preservationists to move marginalized communities’ histories, ontologies of place, methods, and agendas from the edge to the center of practice and policy making. Her work detects effectual, culturally-based planning and preservation practices in historic African American communities, especially those with constituencies and locations, which are difficult to identify.  andrearobertsphd.com // IG: @andrea_on_instagram

Aya Shabu is the creator of Whistle Stop Tours, a walking tour company preserving the cultural memory of African American neighborhoods through the performing arts. Shabu has choreographed for original documentary theater including The Parchman Hour for the 50th Anniversary Reunion of the The Freedom Riders in Jackson, MS, and Orange Light a play about the 1991 Hamlet, NC chicken plant fire. An alum of the African American Dance Ensemble, Shabu has performed with Ronald K. Brown and Sweet Honey in the Rock, and currently dances and drums with The Magic of African Rhythm. https://hayti.org/programming/tours/

Creative Team

Creative Studio Assistant

DRAGONFLY is Robin LaVerne Wilson is Miss Justice Jester: Conceptual. Artist. Performer. Storyteller. Facilitator. Ritualist. Writer. Educator. Curator. Culture Warrior. Tambourinist. Dean of Details. Activist. Photographer. Filmmaker. Scholar. Minister. Ecologist. Accidental senatorial candidate. Texan-New Yorker. Maafa descendant. Nerd. Queer. Eclectic. Eccentric. Curious. AFFILIATIONS: Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Church of Stop Shopping, Pollination Productions, The Opportunity Agenda, Jump-Start Theatre, Theatre Neumarkt, Miss Vera’s Academy, Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, Rutgers University, CUNY School of Professional Studies. INFLUENCES: Sharon Bridgforth, Linda Montano, Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Rev. Billy Talen, Sterling Houston. Dragonflyness.com 

Partners and Funders

Black Spatial Relics: blackspatialrelics.org 

Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC: https://bettysdaughterarts.com/

Creative Capital: https://creative-capital.org/

Coalition of Theaters of Color-City Council: http://routes-mag.com/coalition-of-theatres-of-color

Weeksville Heritage Center:  https://www.weeksvillesociety.org/ 

You can register for this event here.