DATE: February 19, 2025
TIME: 7:30pm
LOCATION: von der Heyden Theater
Join Sadé M Jones on a journey through the African Diaspora mapped within a physical body. Immerse yourself in the inner world of a chrysalis and experience the body as an archival site, a portal, collision point, practice ground and source of light. Through image, light, sound and movement, this experience invites you to consider the ways a body is a living museum - a fractal yet fluid assemblage of stories steeped in Blackness.
The immersive experience is a product of an ongoing communal embodied process called The Womb Cypher. The immersive theatre performance is proceeded by a week of community workshops introducing Sadé's Movement Signature, Body Excavation and Embodied Translation techniques used in The Cypher. Three days following the performance, participate in a drumming in reverence to the ancestors and the land.
artist’s statement
The goal of my work as an artist and healer is to discover the ways ceremonial performance can affect socio-cultural identities. I am curious about the dynamic relationship between the performer, the art, and culture. My creative process over the past five years is based on taking in cultural material, interacting with it internally, then producing something to reinforce or challenge the societal elements the cultural material comes from. I use this process to synergize truths within and across social groups. Currently, I’m discovering ways to use this process to prevent the contraction and stagnation of energy that isn’t of benefit - especially for historically marginalized communities. The process results in a creative product that initiates an internal process for others - performers of the work and its audiences.
My works are an integrative care initiative for mind, body, spirit. Folks of the African Diaspora have been disconnected from their indigenous ways deliberately and as an act of self preservation. Alas, the root ways of our ancestors are more and more the medicine for our afflictions. It is my theory that “the old ways” have survived in subtle expressions through art and culture. I use my artistic, cultural and healing practices along with my spiritual mediums as a conduit to preserve the bridge of old and new and build upon it in ways that are familiar enough to entice people to cross. This contemporary griot role is fundamental to reconnecting people to the collective unconscious where so much healing lives; using the ideas of African traditional practices throughout the Diaspora in the pieces I create. My creative process manifests in three ways: infusing psychological, somatic and spiritual approaches into dance training, curating immersive ritual theatre, and facilitating healing that centers community work in the creation of art.