Seven Works, One Current
Concerts at the water's edge, choreopoetic films and theatre, 2022 to now. Each work opens to its full dates, places and credits.
Reconnecting Currents: Women of the Rivers — Two performers against the sun over the Detroit River. Belle Isle, Detroit, September 2022. Photo: Kirk Donaldson.
Reconnecting Currents: Women of the Rivers — Performers in yellow skirts on the dock, the sun breaking through. Detroit Yacht Club, Belle Isle, Detroit River, September 29–30, 2022. Photo: Kirk Donaldson. Featuring Cici Benn, Oiya Etays, Celia Benvenutti, Njeri Rutherford, Brooke Taylor, Nila Miller and Tiffany Mitchell.
Reconnecting Currents
Women of the Rivers
Reconnecting Currents: Women of the Rivers explores the brown feminine mind, body and spirit's inherent connection to fresh water sources, which consequently connects the people of the African Diaspora to one another.
A two-hour concert and festival, a ten-minute short film (Reconnecting Currents: Femme Rivers) and a forty-five-minute documentary (Reconnecting Currents: Cuba to Detroit).
When and where
Detroit Yacht Club, Belle Isle, Detroit River · September 29–30, 2022
Reconnecting Currents
A Healing at the Huron
A two-hour concert. This interactive event invited the local community to reconnect with freshwater sources such as the Huron River, as well as one another, through reflection, restoration and jubilation. Audience members were invited to both witness and engage in rituals of reconnection.
When and where
Ypsilanti Freighthouse, Huron River, Ypsilanti, Michigan · April 27, 2023
Reconnecting Currents: A Healing at the Huron — poster. Ypsilanti Freighthouse, Huron River, Ypsilanti, Michigan, April 27, 2023.
Reconnecting Currents: Limnol Memories — Gathering at the shoreline. Lake Michigan, Chicago, 2024. Photo: Emily-Melissa Walker. Featuring Sierra Rosetta, Nora Alami and Marsae Lynette.
Reconnecting Currents
Limnol Memories
Limnol Memories is a collective ritual of recollection that explores African diasporic and Indigenous limnological performance practices and cultural memory. Through the waves of Porsha Olayiwola's poem "Water" and Casey Camp-Horinek's film "Water has a Memory," the work highlights women's pivotal roles in water conservation. William Waring Cuney's poem "No Images" reminds us of the transformative potential of embodied, site-specific performance.
Limnol Memories is a call to action, inspiring environmental awareness, activism and cultural resurgence through dance, poetry, theatre and ritual. Witnesses are invited to reflect, recollect and reconnect to the collective journey towards ecological stewardship.
When and where
American College Dance Association 2023 · Flint, Michigan 2024 · Lake Michigan, Chicago 2024
Choreopoem and short film
Collaging Memories | Collective ALTERity
"All we need is no other way…. Don't you remember you?"
A collaged collective choreopoem and short film crafted by founding members of the Aarcc Coalition — Marsae Lynette, Nora Alami and Johanna Middleton. Drawing from their poems, the work embodies memory, ancestral connection, devotion and joy as a revolutionary practice.
Structured as a ritual and gathering, the film meditates on collective care, resistance and the entangled layers of identity and futurity, quilting together poetry, movement and sensory aesthetics inspired by African diasporic and Venusian symbology.
When and where
Lake Michigan, Chicago · May 1, 2024 (Beltane)
Collaging Memories | Collective ALTERity — Marsae Lynette at the water's edge. Lake Michigan, Chicago, May 1, 2024 (Beltane). Photo: Marsae Lynette.
SpellING (Green Bay) — Marsae Lynette with the broom at dawn. Lake Michigan, Chicago, October 2024. Photo: Shawn Antoine II.
Dance film
SpellING (Green Bay)
I offer her this dance at dawn / this cinnamon / this broom / Mopeo Ase Yeye Osun
A dance short film by Shawn Antoine II and Marsae Lynette that explores ritual, intention and ancestral connection through movement. The film opens with the sound of Lake Michigan's waves, paired with Alice Smith's rendition of "I Put a Spell on You." The dance becomes a ceremonial act, sweeping away what no longer serves and calling forth that which is meant.
Best Experimental Short, Astoria Film Festival 2025.
When and where
Filmed October 2024 · Lake Michigan, Chicago
Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women — the company on the set. Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre, Evanston, Illinois, May 17–June 1, 2025.
Theatre · choreography and vocal arrangement
Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women
Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. In this new stage adaptation of E. Patrick Johnson's award-winning book, women from all walks of life recount coming out, falling in love, mother/daughter relationships, religion, sexuality, brutality and political activism — revealing the complexity of identity.
When and where
Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre, Evanston, Illinois · May 17 – June 1, 2025
Short film · in progress
Diviners of Aarcc
A melanated, timeless short film inspired by a conversation with interlocutors Angel Bat Dawid and Kameryn Carter about Sun Ra's concept of Alter Destiny and the mission of the Aarcc Coalition. The film follows the Diviners of Aarcc, a sacred collective of women who use ritual and dance to summon Solari, a celestial being from Canis Majoris, to save humanity.
Merging folklore, dance and poetry, the film interrogates ecological crises, capitalism's impact on marginalized communities and the possibilities of collective imagination to ignite change.
Diviners of Aarcc — film still. Chicago, 2024. Cinematography by Gríma Irmudóttir and Shawn Antoine II. Performances by Bree Gant, Johanna Middleton, Atarah Israel and Marsae Lynette.
When and where
Expected completion July 2026