Friday, May 24, 2024
7:00PM Doors | 7:30PM Performance
Suggested Donation: $10-25 sliding
*none turned away for lack of funds, no pressure*
*NOTE: No food will be served or sold at this event*
Serpentine returns to the Marigny Opera House on May 24th--the feast day of Sarai the Black, or the Black Madonna--with a benefit performance for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, complete with string and orchestral elements. Patrons will enjoy lush, encompassing harmonies in the rustic charm of the Marigny Opera House.
Serpentine is a queer and femme vocal ensemble based out of Bulbancha (New Orleans), Louisiana. Through sound installation and the creation of activated space, Serpentine collaborates with spirit and with community to facilitate places for transformation and healing. Their songs are stories of resiliency, joy, softness, vulnerability, transformation, survival, and deep love. The choir believes that songs change the shape of culture, that songs raise power and call forth change and justice.
An ensemble since 2017, the vocal group embarked on their first international tour to Ireland in Summer 2023.
The Feast of the Rose is a profusion and synthesis of the creative explorations undertaken by MaeDea Ov Moon over the past decade. This utterance weaves together threads of collaborators, voices, songs, writings, movements, ideas, urges that have been nurtured and cultivated over many years and many miles. From the Bulbancha/New Orleans based communally pooled explorations of Fever Dreams and the choral ensemble Serpentine to the traveling experimentations in solitude that MaeDea and Sam Hollier followed through Ireland, Albania and Portugal, these works are continuously inspired by the land in which they are generated and expressed.
Drawing on the story of Inanna’s journey beneath the surface and the emergence through the Oceanic passage shrine of the Black Madonna, The Feast of the Rose centers devotional practices of death, sex, and rebirth. In expression of these worldly patterns of bloom and decay, this performance blends sounds, movements and altar creation to sensorially transport the space and all who enter into it through a narrative journey and somatic exploration of landscapes, wildness, grief, waters, oceans, ever shifting land, and the more than human kin our lives tend. In the invocation of all these elements, we seek to blur the relationship between the creators and receivers of the work, centering the communal experience as the work itself, created by all who bear witness.
Holding the truth that every artist, every person, is a crossroads of ideas and a series of imprints moving through billions of patterns that seep into our consciousness, The Feast draws from a rich array of local talents. In collaboration are vocalists MaeDea Ov Moon, Sarah Peterson, Rosemary Minasian, Vanessa Degrassi, Renee Anderson, Cory Diane, Laura Borealis, Liliana Ruiz-Healy, choral ensemble Serpentine; instrumentalists Sam Hollier, Ian Cooke, Peter Bowling, Shaye Cohn and Howe Pearson; choreographer Katiya Chizayeva with movers Vera Rose, Eris, Kendra Davis; photography and visual installation, Aaron Richmond- Have, the space/container of the Marigny Opera House, facilitated by Evan Hammond.
