Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a maker, performer, educator, and artistic entrepreneur, and Director of TheREDprojectNYC based in NYC. Mercer’s process memoir 4: The word, the spirit, and Little Rock is an active generational collaboration/conversation that incites the practice of simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction of gospel music, black spiritual imagery/idols, and physicalized otherhood through trance.
NYC-based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and dance educator, Angie Pittman investigates how her body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. “Came Up in a Lonely Castle” is created with collaborator and friend Anita Mullin. This work, performed by Pittman and Mullin, emerges from Pittman’s interest in Black quiet, Black nuance, and Black subtlety in performance as an act of resistance.
