TLI Presents: Aracelis Girmay An Experiment in Voices (World Premiere)

What feelings form when I try to recuperate the signal?

Acclaimed poet Aracelis Girmay explores the legacy of her great-grandmother in this words-and-music collaboration with director Dawn M. Simmons, composer Brittany J. Green, and violist Ashleigh Gordon of Castle of our Skins.

“Lois Davis was born in Georgia in 1909 and died in Chicago thirty-five years later, the mother of seven children,” Girmay writes. “When my own children were born, I began to think about her death differently. In this seam-torn work, through arrangements of syntax, gesture, and pitch, I am trying to attune my language to a flickering frequency in relation to this mother and her people and the ‘black noise’ (Saidiya Hartman) we are still making together.”

In collaboration with The Authors Guild Foundation.