**NEW LOCATION: HOTEL PETER AND PAUL (2317 Burgundy Street)
Homecoming Project: Water, presented in partnership with the New Orleans African American Museum, explores the relationship we have with water through stories told in the form of dance, music, spoken word, and film.
Featuring Homecoming Project core artists Sunni Patterson, Frederick Wood, Kesha McKey, free feral, & Jeremy Guyton.
Food for sale from local food trucks.
Homecoming Project (HCP) is a community-based, storytelling performance series that aims to marry high-quality artistic practice with a commitment to maintaining the essential relationship between culture and progressive social change through engagement with and work in communities of oppressed and exploited people.
We understand the immense power of art and culture as a tool for social change. Art allows us to think beyond the margins of textbooks and past the slides of lectures. Art allows people to feel and deeply understand a concept, an experience in a way no other mode of learning is capable of. Art brings people together and artistic collaboration between creatives and community members fosters a community capable of thriving, instead of just surviving.
We do it by listening. We value reciprocal relationships with our community and we believe active listening to be an essential element of community building and community engagement. We listen while honoring the sacred tradition of gathering and sharing stories over food. We listen with our founder John O'Neal's words at the forefront of our minds - "You don't have to like the story that someone else tells but you do have to respect their right to tell it."
We do it for those who have been forced out of the place their ancestors have called home for generations, we do it for those who must watch their historical cultural practices become monetized while they reap no profit, we do it for those who have lost their gathering spaces to new policies that deem them criminal, we do it for those that fight to remind disaster profiteers that our culture and our city cannot be bought.
We are the organizational successor to the Free Southern Theater, founded in 1963, whose objective was to stimulate creative and reflective thought among African Americans in the rural South by bringing the theater to the people. We honor that vision with our Homecoming Project performances by activating public spaces in the neighborhoods they are meant to reflect, making sure that they are accessible to all.
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for hourse and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding.”
