longing to tell

Akua Naru I Tyshawn Sorey I Ensemble Resonanz

»The story isn‘t alive until it is told. The music is the telling.« Akua Naru

Hip Hop artist Akua Naru undertakes a stage adaptation of Tricia Rose’s 2003 book »Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy«, a seminal work of cultural history that employed varied techniques toward »a landmark book in black letters and scholarship. For the first time, we hear the loving, bracing, hurting, humorous, wise, angry, hopeful - and above all honest - voices of black women speaking about sexuality and intimacy« (Michael Eric Dyson).

»Longing To Tell« will distill the book's twenty-one characters to six oral histories that progress through spoken word poetry, rap lyrics, ensemble concert and live musicianship. These oral histories include moments of love and loss, betrayal and commitment, parent-child bonds, domestic violence and sexual abuse, racial terror, sexual identity, pleasure, addiction, community, friendship, childbirth and death. Not interested in a mere retelling, Naru works to delve into folklore, magic and the varied ways of knowing and understanding darkness, hardship, and forces beyond our power as human beings.

»Sorey is neither ›combining‹ genres nor ›crossing over‹ from one into another. He does not so much bridge genre divides as cast them aside, as if they were a vestige of a prehistoric era, before artists as versatile as himself walked the earth.« The NY Times Magazine

Internationally acclaimed composer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey will be collaborating with Akua Naru and write the score. Beneath Naru’s poetry and a 5-piece hip-hop band, »Longing to Tell« will use a European chamber orchestra. The resonance of the classical music tradition, historically loaded with ideas of supremacy and patriarchy, becomes a substantial factor for creating a further level of tension within the narrative between the spoken words and the musical body, thereby supporting the dialogue the piece is willing to provoke.

Displaying encounters, conflicts and cultural-chemical reactions on stage of what sometimes acts as Greek chorus, sometimes resembles the call and response of the Black church, other times the hip hop cypher and classical orchestra tradition, this is to be a conglomerate work in which languages, traditions and rhythms are layered with significance, and magnified by the interaction of words and music this piece underscores. The complex rendering highlights the way that Rose herself has often spoken of seeing her work adapted – that of musical performance.

»Through this braiding together, the orchestra breaks free from our traditional understandings, as they relate to power and access, and elevate to that of sonic lighthouse holding space as Black women navigate the storm.