Press

"The challenge but also the joy of the project has been in realizing the instructions Hughes left in the text,” says [co-adaptor and performer Davóne] Tines…“As a black man myself I thought ‘this can’t be esoteric, it has to be ecstatic joy’ and how that exists in the black community is gospel music. That resulted in a gospel number."

Read full article

Even as the production expanded, they hewed to the original text, says Schachter: “…You create power through repetition and cyclical musical behavior, within a pocket of the story.” They call theirs a “vaudeville oratorio.” It jumps through different genres—from blues narratives, which use a 12-bar form and nested repetition to drive at a musical idea, to South Indian music, where the text repeats, rising in pitch and complexity—to sound out the idea of inheriting oppression across generations.

Read full article