The Blueing: Ceremonies from in the Name of the Mother Tree
by Ebony Noelle Golden
A collective ritual for water veneration. Come ready to walk, participate, and create. Bring water offerings, water, and a water vessel.
ABOUT EBONY NOELLE GOLDEN
Ebony Noelle Golden is an artist, scholar, and culture strategist from Houston, TX and currently based in Harlem. She devises site-specific ceremonies, live art installations, creative collaborations, and arts experiments that explore and radically imagine viable strategies for collective black liberation. In 2020, Ebony launched Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS) which serves as a hub for the study of diasporic black performance traditions. JPS is integral to the development of a five-part theatrical ceremony that will be developed and produced over the next three years with partners in Harlem, Brooklyn, Durham, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy and arts accelerator, that devises systems, strategies, solutions for and with education, arts, culture, and community groups globally. Golden’s current projects include: Jubilee 11213 (in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and generously supported by Creative Capital, Coalition of Theaters of Color, and Black Spatial Relics), free/conjure/black, and In The Name Of (commissioned by Apollo Theatre.)
JUNETEENTH PUBLIC PERFORMANCE COMMISSIONS
Join us June 11–19 throughout New York on a journey towards Black liberation and a celebration of Black joy, dreams, experiences, queerness, resistance, and more. Featuring new works by Ebony Noelle Golden, James Scruggs, Chanon Judson, Niegel Smith, and the Mx. Juneteenth Fire Island Drag Pageant by the Black and Brown Equity Coalition of Fire Island (BaBEC), this year’s Juneteenth public programming is distinct, daring, and engaging.
About The Flea’s Juneteenth Public Performance Program
The Flea’s Juneteenth Public Performance Program is also part of the Festival of New York, a growing collective of 200+ organizations across the five boroughs collaborating to marshal the creativity, resiliency, diversity, and spirit of collaboration that makes New York one of the strongest and most inspiring cities on earth.
The Juneteenth Public Performance Program was piloted by The Flea in 2021 to great success and commissioned and premiered four new public performances: Chanon Judson’s Time’s Up A Liberation Ritual, a new participatory dance piece in Fulton Park of Bed Stuy; James Scruggs’ Ask Me About Juneteenth, where an unusual character offered cotton blooms and cash to viewers willing to engage others in a frank conversation about race; Imani Uzuri’s Jus’ Like A Tree Planted By Water, a performance of experimental interpolations of African American spirituals in Harlem; and, Artistic Director Niegel Smith’s The Worthy, a celebratory walk for justice and Black men from the African Burial Ground to The Flea theater uplifting our souls.