After a period of dreaming underground in the pandemic, The People Can Fly returns stewarded by Creatrix Director, ChE/ Xe.
The People Can Fly is a contemporary rites-of-passage for Queer/Trans/Nonbinary Afro-Indigenous medicine-folq to transform transgenerational trauma, reimagine movement organizing as we know it, and midwife worlds of intersectional liberation into being. Quaring a traditional African American folqtellin’, years of healing programs and intersectional justice organizing weave four transdisciplinary, site-responsive performance rituals that decolonize our relationship to land and body. Responding to generations of heteropatriarchal-white-supremacist-colonial violence, we return the strategically-erased character, Toby, to the sacred role of gender-expansive magical instigator who whispers the words that liberate the enslaved to take flight in a vertically-spiraling Ring Shout.
Originally passed down through oral tradition, this lore has historic roots in a number of diasporic events including the largest U.S. slave revolt, the ongoing seeming disappearance of the enslaved into thin air due to marronage and the Underground Railroad; finding spiritual exaltation in the dances and calls of the Ring Shout; even accounts of the magical and supernatural, where enslaved African and Indigenous peoples were reported to have literally taken to the sky, rising above the oppressive foundations under foot. We study the folqlore’s hidden blueprints to Freedom—learning world-building through marronage, mutual aid networks through the Underground Railroad, spiritual resistance and community mental health strategies through collective ritual.
As the performance rituals unfold, QTGNC2-S BIPOC will gather on sites of collective trauma and resilience to grieve lands disappearing to racist climate apocalypse, heal through re-membered medicine ways, and dream a way out of no way into Afro-Indigenous futurity. Sites include compromised waterways, sugarcane and indigo plantations, sacred burial grounds, abolitionist battlegrounds and more. The narrative unfolds through a deconstructed investigation of the Ring Shout’s core elements:
1. “The Moan/The Shout,” 2. “shufflin/stompin/steppin,” 3. “The Freedom Call-and-Response,” 4. “The Counterclockwise Circle”—as a framework for liberating land, spirit, and collective body.
