A #DignityInProcess Art Action

About OPINION | The Other America:

Rooted in their New Orleans based research in Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice, Heimark Artist-In-Residence ChE has developed a new #DIGNITYINPROCESS art action at the Nightingale Brown House at Brown University that gives voice to the site’s untold narratives of enslaved ancestors. This participatory performance ritual is articulated as feet pounding, percussive gestures of Afro-Contemporary choreography, storytelling, and procession. This performance applies the Afro-Indigenous medicine of the ring shout as a tool for subversive activism, community dialogue, and healing.

Performance Ritual to free enslaved ancestors 5/24/17 & 5/25/17 at John Nicholas Brown Center

Closing Shout House 5/27/17 at Rites & Reason Theatre, Brown University

Deep gratitude to the Center for Slavery & Justice, the community elders, organizers, young leaders, and conjurers who offered heart and spirit to this work..

Ring Shout Practitioners/ Performance Conjurers: Jude Sandy and Yon Tande
Community Organizer: Marco A. McWilliams
Keeper of Prayers: Kat Qunnekenoohkesu Simonds
Founder/ Curator of Black Spatial Relics Artist Residency:  Arielle Brown

New Orleans supporting Residency: One Love Nola

What Lives in the Nightingale House

There are stories here never written

Lore never spoken to youth

Never shouted in rings

Or sung to shape ethic

One by One

We must give voice

To the human beings

Whose shouldered history

We stand upon.

It is in the cracks of this building

Its stench seeps through the chimney smoke

Floorboards creek with voices unsatisfied

Breath unacknowledged for her giving

Without honor

Reverence

Clouds the window pains

Beads of perspiration sliding down glass

This is the sweat you see upon my brow

It is from their labor

From step

Striped

Skin

Shaping

Distorting

A stride across generations

Across a body of women

Whose names I do not know

Grandmothers and Greats

I build an altar in their silence

Their gate is in my hips                                                                                  

Rolling across pelvic floor

A thunderous boom

Pressing my feet into earth

Like they mean to plant me here

To leave their soul imprint

Through the soles of my feet

Until toenails grow

Into fibrous roots

A tangle of matted gnarls beneath me

“Make your bed here,” they ask,

“Stay a while, won’t you

Lay your head upon the floor

Until skull becomes drum

And every drop of pulsing medicine

Is pumped through your pours

To nourish a pregnant earth

Let it seep into this wood grain

The wrinkles that have aged into cracks

You dance upon our skin

Raging with light

Let your body warm us

Until we remember the dawn.”

—ancestral offering thru ChE