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Visions of the Evolution is a series of immersive and interactive healing ritual-performances and ritual-films that invite us to explore our individual healing in conversation with our collective liberation in community with each other.

This series of ritual-performances and ritual-films, inspired by my writings and poetry, explores the relationship between our individual and ancestral healing journeys and our collective liberation and the role of our individual and collective healing journeys in assembling more just, hopeful futures and more loving, liberated communities. In operating from the understanding that we cannot stay the same as individuals or in relation to one another and co-create the emergence of a new and more just, loving world, Visions centers personal and collective healing and reaffirms the role of ritual as vehicles for lasting and transformative social change.

One part performance, one part interactive healing ritual, these immersive healing environments come together through poetry, visual and performative representations, sound and spatial design, movement and interactive ritual practices to create unique experiences. I hope that everyone who experiences, witnesses and participates in Visions of the Evolution leaves with another little piece of their healing journey in place, and another affirmation of the world we want, need and deserve, is not only possible, but promised.

“Visions of the Evolution: The Ritual-Performance Series” is a sponsored project with Allied Media Projects.

A NOTE ON RITUAL

In the liner notes of D’Angelo’s seminal album, Voodoo, poet and musician Saul Williams writes, “I personally believe in art as it exists in the context of the phrase ‘thou art God.’ In this phrase, art is the word that connects the individual (thou) to their higher self (God) or to that which is universal.” In his book, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, Malidoma Patrice Somé, writes, “The focus here is not on ritual itself, but on opening up something in hearts and spirits that has been locked away so long that individuals can barely remember the source.” “Ritual,” he continues, “is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence.” Throughout indigenous African ontologies and across Afrodiasporic frameworks, the artist and the healer were viewed as one and the same. Art was always a healing practice. Healing was always an artistic medium. It is from this lineage that Visions of the Evolution was born. And it is within this framework, that Visions of the Evolution takes shape.

In anthropological studies, across time, distance and location, the role of ritual has been foregrounded as a process of social connection and collective meaning-making in the human experience, “the basic social act”; a space of belonging, providing the essential tools for co-creating our own lives; a site of renewal, a reminder of interconnectedness of all life, a realm of transference, allowing us to enter a space of momentary freedom and loosened inhibitions that help us access the glow of our most transcendent and authentic selves. This the purpose of the Visions of the Evolution healing ritual-performance series.