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Event
HURRICANE SEASON: The hidden messages in water
Alixa and Naima comprise the soul-sister co-conspiracy of arts activist known as Climbing Poetree. With roots in Haiti and Colombia, Alixa and Naima reside in Brooklyn and track footprints across the country and globe on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity. In five self-organized independent tours, Climbing PoeTree has catalyzed over 500 crowds in more than 70 cities from Oakland to Atlanta, Johannesburg to Havana with artists such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Danny Glover, The Last Poets, and Dead Prez.
Alixa and Naima are premiered their highly-anticipated two-woman show in Philadelphia on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (8/29/08), kicking off a 50-city national tour that obliterates the boundaries between performance and activism. Entitled Hurricane Season: the hidden messages in water, the show is traveling the nation in a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil, landing in Pittsburgh on September 2nd. Climbing Poetree will perform at the Grey Box Theatre at 3595 Butler St
Through a tapestry of spoken-word poetry, video projection, dance, shadow art, and a sound collage of personal testimonies, Hurricane Season connects the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the unnatural disasters disenfranchised communities are experiencing nationwide and worldwide on a daily basis. Hurricane Season tackles global warming, environmental injustice, policing, prisons, militarization, corporate domination, gentrification, and displacement as they manifest from one gulf to another, with a powerful tale of resistance, resilience, creativity and survival.
The show will be followed by a solutions-cipher, a forum that addresses the impacts of the issues surfaced in Hurricane Season on a local level, and illuminates solutions that are already underway. The objective of the post-show solutions-ciphers is to cross-pollinate creative strategies for self-determination and to turn the passion generated in the show into action manifested in the community. Representatives from FedUp! Human Rights Coalition and Sankofa Community Empowerment Inc. will be featured at the dialogs to garner support for their initiatives and give audience members access into local social justice movements.
As the concept for Hurricane Season has been growing, says Adrienne Brown, Executive director of the Ruckus Society, I have watched Alixa and Naima open themselves up to the darkest material in the world in order to find the slivers of hope and solution within, and now they are coming back to us with prophecy and hope, and we are all waiting, trusting that what they found will move us.
Rhythmic and uplifting, revealing and deeply moving, Hurricane Season seeks not to captivate audiences, but to liberate them. A solutions-cipher will follow every show, where audience members participate in a dialog featuring local grassroots organizations, visionaries, and healers, to draw vital connections between shared struggles and common solutions in a critical moment in human history.
[Alixa and Naima are] two wise and beautiful souls spouting the truth in such a way that makes one cry and laugh and rage and hope all in a matter of hours, audience member Michelle Pizzuli accounts. Climbing PoeTree creates, something so raw, and so inspiring. I hope their message will be heard by all.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
about Climbing PoeTree: www.climbingpoetree.com
about Hurricane Season: www.hurricaneseasontour.com
about FedUp!: www.thomasmertoncenter.org/fedup
about Sankofa: www.myspace.com/SankofaEmpowerment
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LocationGrey Box Theatre
3595 Butler St.
Pittsburgh, PA
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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