For Immediate Release
Contact: Alisha Patterson, Managing Director
Phone: (202)271-4889
Email: [email protected]
Afro Punk Ballet
Afro House's Afrofuturistic Opera-Ballet
Baltimore, MD – September 20, 2018– Levi, a brilliant military scientist with a unique spiritual knowledge of space and time creates a second sun. The unprecedented devastation of his sun brings the nation’s inhabitants near extinction. Levi’s unwillingness to face the realities of his creation, leaves his eldest daughter and successor, Corfaszia, to restore order to the land. Jakub, the younger of the two daughters, with a deep connection to the spirit world, is forced into exile.
Inspired by the experience of spiritual possession in the black southern gospel tradition and similar experiences within the Afro Punk Movement, Afro Punk Ballet utilizes a soundscape that encompasses the styles of punk music, 20th century French music, and southern gospel music. With contemporary ballet’s use of abstraction, the world of Afro Punk Ballet is futuristic and mythical. By using the grandeur of opera and ballet, this piece strives to tell an epic story that challenges popular notions of heroism, morality and futurism.
Afro Punk Ballet will be performed at The Peale on October 4th, 5th and 6th at 8:00 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at here. Tickets include a performance of Act I of Afro Punk Ballet and an opportunity to go deeper into the work through a talkback that will follow the performance. Stay for the talkback and learn more about how this Afrofuturistic opera-ballet will continue to unfold.
A short documentary about Afro Punk Ballet can be found here.
About Afro House
Founded in 2011 by Alisha Patterson and Scott Patterson, Afro House is a Baltimore-based music driven performance art house. The organization is comprised of professional artists whose collective skills, knowledge and craftsmanship are channeled for the creation of art that disrupts normative ideas about human being. Musicians, dancers, designers, actors, image makers and writers push the boundaries of their own discipline so that each art form might effectively bleed into the next, creating something evolutionary.
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