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Collaging Memories | Collective ALTERity
May 01, 2024
This ritual was held and filmed on Beltane (Bealtaine) historically observed in Ireland and Scotland. Rituals were performed to protect cattle, people and crops, and to encourage growth. Special bonfires were kindled, whose flames, smoke and ashes were believed to have protective powers. The people and their cattle would walk around or between bonfires and sometimes leap over the flames or embers.
Choreopoetic Film
Filmed by Marsae Lynette, Nora Alami, and Johanna Middleton
Film & Audio Edited by Marsae Lynette
Photos by Marsae Lynette
Music includes excerpts from Sault "We Are Gods", WILLOW & Jon Batiste "home", Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble "Solar Power", Whitney Houston "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", Kanye West "God Breathed"
“All we need is no other way…. Don’t you remember you?”
Collaging Memories | Collective ALTERity is a collaged collective choreopoem and short film crafted by some of Aarcc Coalitions founding members —Marsae Lynette, Nora Alami, and Johanna Middleton. Drawing from their poems titled —Self Offering, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, Pour, Joy’s Been Kidnapped, Odutola Told, and others—the work embodies themes of 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. It quilts together poetry, movement, and sensory aesthetics inspired by African diasporic and Venusian symbology to explore liberation and intimacy through unchoreographed relationality. Central to the narrative are questions of communal expansion, rupture, and the multiplicity of joy as resistance. Collaging Memories | Collective ALTERity celebrates the Aarcc Coalition’s multifariousness while honoring care and interrelationality as acts of melanated timelessness and worldbuilding.
