A Haitian psychic mother and daughter are tasked by the spirit realm, Up Yonder, to save a Black colonial “lost city,” Weeksville, buried underneath rapidly-gentrifying Brooklyn, New York.

Pitch:

BRICKS, (a 20-YEAR MUSIC TOUR of RETROACTIVE-REPARATIONS) is an always-changing script-template

detailing the history-repeating shared injustice of "buried" towns.

We begin with a lost city, Weeksville, the largest Freedpersons town in 1832 and its desecration for the progression and expansion of Brooklyn, NY. We jump through time again and again, and land in the early 2000s – when Black neighborhoods still looked like Ashanti music videos. There, YOUNG MAELLE is able to see Weeksville spirits. She even makes new friends - but then things get scary as we consider how the spirits were moved and removed from the land.

Her mother, Colette, knows this burden too well. She gifts her spirit-blockers: Rose-

tinted, Baker-Miller pink sunglasses, concealing Maelle’s spirit world - turning the spirits into the ones ignored the most: our unhoused.

However, when Colette is called Up Yonder by the spirits to do their bidding - to restore Weeksville’s former glory and see its conquering city fall as it did in the

biblical story of Jericho – a mother fights for her child’s innocence Up Yonder, while down in Brooklyn A Young child Maelle becomes a woman. 
 Magic and machete fights ensure. In the end, we see how the spirit world is imperative for revolution as the walls indeed fall - and bricks of a new world are imagined communally.

Theatre making and performance, along with material artist-activism is my response to the ongoing erasure and callousness I experience as a dark-skinned Black Queer femme living through active genocide. Thus, my cultural works are in service of Black liberation, love, and libation. Afro-folklore, particularly within the Haitian Vodoun canon, magical realism, generational gifts and healing, land memory and self-determination are major themes for me. 

Horrifying my Haitian immigrant parents, I dropped out of a full-tuition scholarship at Howard University’s School of Business - as a kiss of death from the myopic appeals of Black Excellence, and left to study musical theatre at a state school in New Jersey, where I’m from. Disappointed by the scarcity of humanizing roles, I began to write in search of joyful, rebellious, sexy, and smart roles for Fat, Queer, and dark-skinned Black femmes of various ability and gender, particularly as my ability and gender transformed after several surgeries left me in chronic pain. From there, my writing shifted from righteous indignation to healing as a tool for longevity and a promise of a long, easeful life. 

As I grew in my practice and my studies - largely defined by Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Franz Fanon, June Jordan- I deepened my deference to the spirit realm, our late elders, and our unhoused - which can be found in my work. BRICKS and KING AFUA both consider the knowing of land keeping the score, and leaving imprints felt in the body of those who dwell on lands that hold colonization and colonial gentrification. 

BRICKS and KING AFUA are my latest developments. I am in final interviews with the Lakou Nou fellowship with Haiti Cultural Exchange, where BRICKS can be in further facilitated conversation with Haitian community members in Crown Heights. I am a teaching artist in creative writing with LEAP NYC and Writopia NYC, and am a studio associate over at ISCP where I develop Maliyamungu Gift Muhande's documentarian work. Narrative and story is my home base, as I believe all work is inherently political. Outside of my work, you’ll find me at food serves, or plotting on my next guerrilla art scheme.