Writer

Composer:

Link: Spirit Moves (hosted on INvision)

Conceptual Illustration by Tommy Jackson, Graphic Design by Corinne Hayes

Spirit Moves is a community opera where partnerships can be made or strengthened through storytelling, dance, food access, call and response.

Note: to be performed in partnership with a community and local productive garden or farm.  The premiere production partnered with Steamonward and provided 500 students with culturally specific seeds to plant, harvest and eat.

Synopsis: It is dinner time, and although Gladys has spent more days in the hospital than at home in the last couple of years, she is going to the community garden and pulling some potatoes to prepare a meal for her widowed son Jerry and her grandchild they affectionately call “Baby Child.” While filling her bag and sharing health updates with her neighbors and her son’s mourning of his wife Lisa, Gladys feels the spirit of her late husband Freddie.  Freddie’s presence inspires Gladys to dance, and lead call and response with her community.  Baby Child interrupts everything after being called bad names by other neighborhood kids, and Gladys takes this opportunity to instill her life lesson of liberating love through dancing with the Spirit as she once taught their father who has almost forgotten.  Gladys must leave something (a groove) for Jerry to remember before joining Freddie and Lisa in the afterlife.