Dearly Beloved,
Invite you to visit my newly established Patreon page, where you and I can be directly in touch via fresh weekly and monthly creative updates (optional to your inbox but always available on the Patreon site!)
Your support will sustain the intense conjuration happening as we enter a new season of re-designing our lives and our relationships to true Prosperity on Earth together! I look forward to seeing you there!
Click here to check out Karma Mayet on Patreon and join the tribe!
Grateful to celebrate the publication of the script of my Blues opera in the latest issue of journal Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
Honored to be in the glorious company of so many powerful voices gathered in this volume!
The Elemental Women move, sing and conjure ancestral memory in a workshop performance of Indigo.
me and my longlost cousin Zi-jah after rehearsal in Chengdu
Traveling to Liangshan, China, to meet and collaborate with Nuosu traditional musicians and actors was a life-changing experience. Working with composer and vocalist Martha Redbone to learn and perform Eastern Woodlands songs, and being introduced to Nuosu sounds as well, was an unexpected home-coming.
The highlight of my journey was finding true kinship with the folks I worked with from the Liangshan region, the Nuosu folks who reminded Martha of her Cherokee kin with echoes of dress and ritual reminiscent of the pow-wow. One of the song-keepers and I formed a bond based on our sense of being long-lost cousins, and our facial resemblance reminded me that we are truly one family of humanity. See us here together in the pic above! Meet my long lost sister-cousin, Zi-jah, master traditional song-teacher and one of the kindest souls I have ever known.
At the Famous Liangshan Torch Festival with new friends, beautiful young traditional dancers who welcomed us warmly.
The story we staged, Flood in the Valley, was a tale of love between young people from feuding families, and involved a community in protest of a construction project that would ruin their ecosystem by building a dam.
So many parallels in the needs, visions, rooted cultural practices and desires for liberation among these mountain communities of Appalachia and Liangshan, though seemingly a world apart.
And I now have family in Western China, who keep in touch and with whom I hope to work again as soon as I can gather support for the next creative journey of exchange!
Traveling with Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, the opera, is a gift. Our tour dates to festivals in Singapore and Holland this Spring and Summer have given us the opportunity to delve deeper into the many layers of this urgent work, and to experience how people across the globe are engaging the questions of environmental and political disaster, refuge and the building of true community.
Our Singapore experience was exquisite.
https://sifa.sg/programmes/octavia-e-butlers-parable-of-the-sower/
We were moved by the Holland Festival and the Black Amsterdam community multi-level engagement with Octavia's work, and our trip there coincided with her birthday!
https://www.hollandfestival.nl/en/program/2018/octavia-e-butler-s-parable-of-the-sower/
