/peh-LO-tah/ Online Fundraiser
Donation protected
"Ultimately, I’m intrigued by the elusive riddle of equality, and provoked by the notion that soccer is the only thing the entire planet can agree to do together. It is the official sport of this spinning ball. "
/peh-LO-tah/ is my latest full-evening performance work linking culture and sport together to detail the complexities of soccer as a conduit for both global joy and global corruption. Based on my experiences as a child of Haitian immigrants playing the game in the U.S., and the journals of my travels to the World Cups in South Africa and Brazil, /peh-LO-tah/ will bring to life startling folktales and social commentaries using dance, shadow animation, spoken word and live music. Early explorations of ideas in this work are now on view in a site-specific performance at Central Park curated by Creative Time. /peh-LO-tah/ is produced by MAPP International Productions , and has been commissioned by The Kennedy Center and will premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
The most significant moment in our development process is coming up in just a few short months. The entire creative team is coming together for two weeks in San Francisco to co-create the music, choreography, and shadow work for our evening length piece. We’ve raised enough money from Theater Communications Group, the MAP Fund, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to complete early research, generate provocative source material and to contract all the performers. However, this critical residency, which includes artists from five different U.S. cities, is where the fun begins and the work gets made. We need to raise another $25,000 for travel costs, theater rental, materials costs and artists fees for 12 collaborators for the most essential creation period… or we miss the chance to premiere next Fall.
If you can help us by donating, thank you, thank you, thank you. Whether you can give or not, please follow us on Facebook or Twitter, and share the project with anyone you think might be interested. SPREADING THE WORD IS HUGELY HELPFUL.
This $25,000 goal puts us in a healthy place to meet the bare bones goals we’ve set.
All of your contributions give us more time to fully focus on our work, grow, contribute, document it all, and essentially make our art practices more sustainable and available to YOU!
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In my first memory of the game, we are running barefoot, uphill on limestone. Baby Doc Duvalier is chillin’ in a mansion in the distance, but here, every boy on my grandpa’s block is chasing a tennis ball bandaged in loose socks, passing it with our feet. NYC kid visiting for the summer, USA kid in the hemisphere’s poorest country, only time I fit in with the rest is inside of the game. My love of soccer is a heritage story… From childhood through the recent past, I’ve been growing towards this new work…
/Peh-LO-tah/ explores the ecology of egalitarianism played out inside the world’s game. It is a story of my body in its late summer years; the physics of a globally networked economy running in tandem with the fragile network of a dancer’s anatomy.
It is a bet that visible bodies and the dramatized shadow can co-exist as complementary modes of narration; that sweat will have as much currency as silhouette to transition both narrative point of view and visual dimension. For my company of collaborators, it is a structural experiment: physically demanding, visually deft, viscerally reaching, linguistically twisted in hip hop and hope.
Ultimately, I’m intrigued by the elusive riddle of equality, and and provoked by the notion that soccer is the only thing the entire planet can agree to do together. It is the official sport of this spinning ball. My inquiry involves the joy of the game against the complexity of the global south sites of the last two World Cups. It acknowledges that all conversations tied to ecology are ALSO tied to democracy and economy.
The work is sprung from the bliss- my bliss- of a goal scorer’s run, it shares what his countrymen do after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom…
- Marc Bamuthi Joseph
/peh-LO-tah/ is my latest full-evening performance work linking culture and sport together to detail the complexities of soccer as a conduit for both global joy and global corruption. Based on my experiences as a child of Haitian immigrants playing the game in the U.S., and the journals of my travels to the World Cups in South Africa and Brazil, /peh-LO-tah/ will bring to life startling folktales and social commentaries using dance, shadow animation, spoken word and live music. Early explorations of ideas in this work are now on view in a site-specific performance at Central Park curated by Creative Time. /peh-LO-tah/ is produced by MAPP International Productions , and has been commissioned by The Kennedy Center and will premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
The most significant moment in our development process is coming up in just a few short months. The entire creative team is coming together for two weeks in San Francisco to co-create the music, choreography, and shadow work for our evening length piece. We’ve raised enough money from Theater Communications Group, the MAP Fund, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to complete early research, generate provocative source material and to contract all the performers. However, this critical residency, which includes artists from five different U.S. cities, is where the fun begins and the work gets made. We need to raise another $25,000 for travel costs, theater rental, materials costs and artists fees for 12 collaborators for the most essential creation period… or we miss the chance to premiere next Fall.
If you can help us by donating, thank you, thank you, thank you. Whether you can give or not, please follow us on Facebook or Twitter, and share the project with anyone you think might be interested. SPREADING THE WORD IS HUGELY HELPFUL.
This $25,000 goal puts us in a healthy place to meet the bare bones goals we’ve set.
All of your contributions give us more time to fully focus on our work, grow, contribute, document it all, and essentially make our art practices more sustainable and available to YOU!
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In my first memory of the game, we are running barefoot, uphill on limestone. Baby Doc Duvalier is chillin’ in a mansion in the distance, but here, every boy on my grandpa’s block is chasing a tennis ball bandaged in loose socks, passing it with our feet. NYC kid visiting for the summer, USA kid in the hemisphere’s poorest country, only time I fit in with the rest is inside of the game. My love of soccer is a heritage story… From childhood through the recent past, I’ve been growing towards this new work…
/Peh-LO-tah/ explores the ecology of egalitarianism played out inside the world’s game. It is a story of my body in its late summer years; the physics of a globally networked economy running in tandem with the fragile network of a dancer’s anatomy.
It is a bet that visible bodies and the dramatized shadow can co-exist as complementary modes of narration; that sweat will have as much currency as silhouette to transition both narrative point of view and visual dimension. For my company of collaborators, it is a structural experiment: physically demanding, visually deft, viscerally reaching, linguistically twisted in hip hop and hope.
Ultimately, I’m intrigued by the elusive riddle of equality, and and provoked by the notion that soccer is the only thing the entire planet can agree to do together. It is the official sport of this spinning ball. My inquiry involves the joy of the game against the complexity of the global south sites of the last two World Cups. It acknowledges that all conversations tied to ecology are ALSO tied to democracy and economy.
The work is sprung from the bliss- my bliss- of a goal scorer’s run, it shares what his countrymen do after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom…
- Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Organizer
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Organizer
New York, NY
