The next show I’m designing is premiering in Philly at the end of May. It’s an amazing team working on an incredible poem and we’re all excited to finally get to show it to the public. So if you’re around you should come and check it out. links to the tickets are in my bio and a little more about the production is below.
Girard College's Campus for the City Presents Be Holding - Meditating on Black Genius, Justice, and Joy
Ross Gay's poem Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.
BE HOLDING is an original performance that will premiere in Philadelphia at Girard College on May 31st, 2023 created by poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, New Music Ensemble Yarn/Wire, and director Brooke O’Harra. The text is performed by poets Yolanda Wisher and David Gaines, accompanied by students from Girard college, a video installation designed by Catching on Thieves and Matthew Deinhart, lighting design by Itohan Edoloyi and sound design by Eugene Lew.
If you missed @songofjoyplay last year (pictured here), we’re remounting it to kick off the The Tanks 2023 season on 01/12/23. Tickets are now available.
Playwright/performer @carolmazzz
Director @nickjamesbrowne
Choreography/performer @alishaddoesit
Costume designer @xindddddiii
Sound designer @comet260
Sets and lights by me
