FLY | DROWN (2019)

FLY | DROWN is a dance folktale honoring Black women’s movement towards flight. Set in a post-Great Migration home in Detroit, MI, it is an interwoven story of two characters, elder and nyeusi, moving between the mundane, the majestic, fact, and fable. nyeusi, a Sankofa bird from the ocean (and perhaps elder’s child from another lifetime) has been conjured into the home to teach elder how to find the flight in her flesh.

The performance excavates the interiority of Black women’s lives and Black aesthetic making to trace corporeal and material cartographies utilized to obtain a Black freedom(s). The home is a site to consider how Black women renegotiate their edges, rename themselves, and expand the capacity of their breathing. 

Curator: Taylor Renee Aldridge Producer: Nadia Tykulsker Media Design: Devin Drake Sound Design: Sterling Toles

FLY | DROWN was generously funded by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, ARTXDetroit, Queer | Art, Cranbrook Art Museum (Material Detroit), and Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists which is made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Future iterations and developments of this work are currently being supported by Wexner Arts Center and The Philadelphia Thing.