Inside the 2024-25 Season

Here’s an Artistic Director insider secret: sometimes the line-up for a season is most determined by artist availability or whether funding came through for a specific project or if a crucial venue could be booked.  We work hard to craft throughlines that tell a full artistic story through a season of carefully curated performances, but sometimes we are at the mercy of schedules and technical details.  And sometimes, in these chance pairings, surprising new connective touchpoints emerge, illuminating the threads of commonality that can be found even between very different works of art.

This season at Journey Arts I see a meditation on growth — psychically, across a community, between generations, across borders, in the deepest part of the self.  And although I didn’t plan for our organizational name change to coincide with this season, it really feels like synchronicity that these journeys of growth will be offered under a new name that embraces that idea of collective transformation, of traveling together into new depths, new worlds, new ideas.  Traveling together means even more opportunity for growth.  It means opening ourselves to different paces, different styles, different pain, different joy.

Here’s a brief look at our itinerary:

Make Ready Again

With the solo dance-theater show Make Ready Again, Marguerite Hemmings proposes a new way of understanding what it means to be a child of the African diaspora in this moment.  The story is told through artful dance, monologues, and the use of light and shadow to bring Marguerite’s multiple selves to life.  The soundscape is reggae-inflected and influenced by African rhythms, played live by a 5-member band throughout the piece.

Eight Eight Time

Eight Eight Time is like watching a retro reel-to-reel movie  — the immensity of 4 grand pianos and epic themes like birth and aging, but the intimacy of a close-up seat, with the four pianists having this musical conversation in the room with you. The styles traverse the breadth of their artistic groundings — from jazz to classical to Latin — and are accompanied by poetry and projected images woven from stories gathered in community storytelling circles.

The Table Sessions

with Daniel de Jesús

The Table Sessions with Daniel de Jesús will be a dive into the world of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.  A trio of cellos and voices tell the story of Lorca’s poetic Sonetos de Amor Oscuro in a sonic exploration of unrequited queer love, enhanced by the full-sensory experience of eating a dinner inspired by the cuisine of Lorca’s home in Andalusia.

It will be like an epic tour with old friends, new sights and sounds, a new sense of direction.  Let’s go…