Premieres in Houston, TX APRIL 6, 2024
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is a migrating performance and archive that preserves the living memories of eight Black matriarchs of the North and South sides of Houston, TX. Their shared stories will be the source for original sound scores, choreographies, and garments that will be experienced as a site-specific performance, album, feast, online archive, anthological catalog, and a mercurial system of somatic, embodied sound and dance practice.
The project is set to premiere in Houston in April 2024. Hearn is currently developing a memory-keeping practice that will tour to Pittsburgh, PA, Washington DC, and New York, NY as a way to archive the living memories of their dance mothers within their communities.
Memory Fleet is created for the people and places that have mothered Jasmine. It is for all Black people who mother. The project begins with Hearn’s return home and a solo, MEMORY KEEP(H)ER, made with their grandmother, Claudette Nickens Johnson as a way to build an alternative archive for her stories since she was beginning to lose her ability to remember.
Email: memoryfleet@gmail.com
Instagram: @memory_fleet
SUPPORT
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is a 2022 Creative Capital and 2022 National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks in partnership with Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens, NY, Dance Place, Washington, DC, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, New York Live Arts, New York, New York. Memory Fleet was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Cover photo by Preetika Rajgariah with Jasmine Hearn and Sandra Organ Solis on the corner of Emancipation, Houston, TX. Photo above by Jay Warr.