WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION A RITUAL TRILOGY

ABOUT WATCHNIGHT

Taking inspiration from the last words exchanged between two young boys walking toward home and police officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri, WATCHNIGHT: 'WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION', is a multi-faceted, ritual performance cycle that invites audiences to participate in adapted liturgical practices, towards communal consciousness, nourishment, and witness-bearing.

Commissioning the aspirational sense of a “Watchnight” service from black church traditions in the South Eastern United States, an interdisciplinary cast including actors, musicians, poets, designers, dancers, as well as culinary and agricultural practitioners, delivers the experience of a secular liturgy laden with intention and materiality. Three works comprise the cycle: PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE: a rite of responsibility, COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration, and COMPLINE NOIR: a ritual of healing and satisfaction. The performance cycle takes place from over the course of three days, and incorporates a retreat-style experience including wellness workshops, inspiring conversations, curated meals at table, music sessions, and DJ sets.

WATCHNIGHT holds space for another way of seeking moral transformation, while reclaiming the artists role as poet and priest: the unity of which is demonstrated in this trilogy through modes of witness-bearing, the giving of testimony, and through the breaking of bread. The performance construct applies appropriated liturgical practices, the efficacy of which are in the modern context both historically meaningful and profoundly insufficient. The trilogy is undergirded by a return to fraught religious and cultural memory and materials in order to make demands of those sites for future wellness, radical new imaginaries, and diverse subjectivities.

The idea of the Watch service, provides a kind of existential schema, from which to stage the precisely constructed rituals of the trilogy. The traditional Watch night service, which is not wholly unlike the olio, or the variety cabaret, and from that starting place as the mode or the impetus for the gathering, we can approach the work of commemoration, invocation, and celebration. The Compline-inpired service is the culmination of the trilogy. Compline is a late night prayer and song service that traditionally takes place in calculated darkness, and often features a small choir of voices in the loft above the parishioners—whose silent prayers and kneeling are visible only within the meek light of candles. In this way, darkness becomes the primary space of encounter, of revelation, and of becoming.

WATCHNIGHT proposes a shift in epistemological frameworks in terms of the nature of formation in individuals and societies. This ritual-based work relies on an assumption that change happens in the body, such that all social change requires embodied practices. Further, this work argues that joy is the goal of justice, and that the satisfaction and pleasure of oppressed peoples is the most critical element of liberation. Reparation, in this sense, includes leisure, repose, solitude, and pleasure in its scope.

P7P7 (PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE): a rite of responsibility 

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE: a rite of responsibility, is a participatory performance work that invites audiences to sit, kneel, and chant text from Martin Luther King’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail". The call and response structure of the piece appropriates an Episcopal church service, invoking the particular readers to whom King responded with the famous letter, following the public denunciation of the Freedom movement by religious leadership, including that of the Episcopal church. PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE has been performed in theaters, chapels, schools, and was selected for the 2020 Holland Festival. It represents the first installment in the artist's ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION.

C7M7N (COMMUNION): a ritual of nourishment and commemoration

In what ways does a meal distinctly allow commemoration and also provide nourishment? And where are the joy-working and life-sustaining spaces of the future?

COMMUNION (C7M7N) is a participatory “blues Eucharist” inspired by Kenyon Adams’ early experiences in the Black Protestant churches of his childhood in the Southeast region of the United States. In collaboration with chef and artist Omar Tate (featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog), food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn (The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food: A Cookbook), and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Kenyon is creating an offering to the audience, with poems, prayers, movement, music, and food. The ritual applies the distinct paradox which imbues a Eucharistic meal: the partaking of which is simultaneously a commemoration of death as well as a claim of unity with that which cannot die or be diminished. COMMUNION seeks to construct new spaces and traditions of testimony and witness.

This work is part of the artist’s own reckoning with death in the pandemic and the ways it has disproportionately affected BIPOC communities, as well as the ongoing violence against black bodies within American society.

COMPLINE NOIR: a ritual of healing and satisfaction

COMPLINE NOIR is the third installation in the artists ritual trilogy entitled, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. Set in the near dark, the piece is a sonic and sensory experience that invites the audience to seek a fulsome solitude, at once alone and together, in the intimate, music-filled, and silent moments created by the artist. Aligning contemplation and action, COMPLINE NOIR participants experience a final somatic release through a Chicago House music-inspired dance party and concert performance featuring healing tonics, hydration, and nationally recognized DJs. The piece delivers a distinct and unexpected culmination to the artist’s years-long work with the trilogy. COMPLINE NOIR includes design elements from collaborators Kate Freer and David Arevalo.