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*
MaeDea ov Moon, the director of Serpentine Choir, returns to the Marigny Opera House on May 24th—the feast day of Sarai the Black. This special performance weaves choral and orchestral compositions by MaeDea and Sam Hollier and is in collaboration with vocalists Sarah Peterson, Rosemary Minasian, Vanessa Degrassi, Renee Anderson, Cory Diane, Laura Borealis, Liliana Ruiz-Healy, choral ensemble Serpentine; instrumentalists Ian Cooke, Peter Bowling, Shaye Cohn, and Howe Pearson; choreographer Katiya Chizayeva with movers Vera Rose, Kendra Mecca, Emily Madeira; visual installation by Aaron Richmond-Havel; altar installation by Vera Rose, Marcella Singleton, and Elyse Muñoz. Proceeds from the performance go to Native Hope, a nonprofit organization that exists to dismantle barriers and inspire hope for unheard Native voices.
MaeDea ov Moon is a transdisciplinary artist based out of New Orleans. They compose and lead multiple projects, including Nhktar, a duo layering, vocals, cello, piano and electronics; Painted Honey, a four person group of guitar, vocals, cello and violin; and Serpentine choir, a community arts practice that focuses on addressing collective and ecological trauma through song. Within music, art, and movement, MaeDea’s trauma-informed work weaves queer visions and erotic embodiment into forms of personal, collective, and ecological healing.
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.
Photographer: Aaron Richmond-Havel
