Save the Date | Arts & Social Justice Panel & Blackbird, Fly
Arts & Social Justice Panel
Thursday, November 17, 2022, | 6:30 PM | Location TBA| (Register Here)
Join Bamuthi and local activist artists Dzidzor for a conversation on arts and social justice moderated by André de Quadros.
Dzidzor (Jee-Jaw) is African folklore, performing artist, author, and entrepreneur. Didzor’s style of call and response has re-imagined poetry and story-telling as a way to include the audience in an experience to challenge, inspire and encourage self beyond traditional forms. She began performing through slam poetry and now curates spaces for Black Cotton Club, and teaches in Boston. Born in Italy, to Ghanian Parents and raised in North Carolina. She’s immersed herself in merging cultures from the South to Ghanaian culture. She’s a vessel chosen to deliver a message through writing, performance, and community organizing. Her debut poetry collection, “For Girls Who Cry in Yellow” explores the healing process from the perspective of an African woman. Dzidzor has been nominated twice, for a Boston Music Awards. Dzidzor is scheduled to release her debut EP entitled, “bush woman” on April 10th, 2020.
André de Quadros, conductor, ethnomusicologist, music educator, writer, and human rights activist has conducted and undertaken research in over forty countries around the globe. André de Quadros is at the forefront of conducting pedagogy and has pioneered a process of music-making that stretches the boundaries of traditional choral music-making by developing a new cross-cultural experimental repertoire with influences from Arab, Indian, Latin American, and Indonesian music. He is the Artistic Director of the Bali International Choir Festival and Artistic Director for the London International Music Festival; a member of Interkultur’s World Choir Council; and an advisor on the Board of the International Federation for Choral Music.
Friday, November 18, 2022, | 7:00 PM | Tsai Performance Center | (Register Here)
BLACKBIRD, FLY weaves together an enduring tapestry of movement, narrative, music, and Haitian folklore to engage audiences in dialog about critical questions of our time. Steeped in a hip-hop aesthetic, this intimate duet between two preeminent sons of Haitian immigrants —composer/violinist DBR, and arts activist & spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph —unveils their life stories in search of their identity and role models, and explores universal themes of tolerance and inclusion.
This work is a culmination of DBR and BAMUTHI’s collaborations with Atlanta Ballet, Boston Children’s Chorus, University of Houston, SF Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Opera Philadelphia. In each of these communities, they have created and premiered new works offering myriad experiential arts education opportunities. Introspective yet uplifting, BLACKBIRD, FLY heightens our collective consciousness and sheds new light on the arts as a powerful tool for social and civic engagement.
Artist Info:
BAMUTHI (Marc Bamuthi Joseph) is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. Bamuthi’s opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one of 2017’s “Best Classical Music Performances” by The New York Times. His evening-length work created in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, “The Just and The Blind,” was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered in a sold-out house at Carnegie in March 2019. His upcoming opera “Watch Night” is inspired by the forgiveness exhibited by the congregation of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, and will premiere at The Perelman Center in New York in 2023.
While engaging in a deeply fulfilling and successful artistic career, Bamuthi also proudly serves as Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. He is in high demand for his creative approach to organizational design, brand development, and community mediation, and has been enlisted as a strategic partner or consultant for companies ranging from Coca-Cola to Carnegie Hall. His TED talk on linking sport to freedom design among immigrant youth has been viewed more than 1 million times and is a testament to his capacity to distill complex systems into accessible and poetic presentations. Bamuthi’s community development philosophy, called “The Creative Ecosystem”, has been implemented in dozens of cities across the United States and is the subject of several critical writings, including one of the seminal essays in “Cultural Transformations: Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility”, published by Harvard Education Press.
Bamuthi is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one-day festivals which activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life. His essays have been published in Harvard Education Press; he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and has carried adjunct professorships at Stanford and Lehigh, among others.