The Messenger follows a community of seekers whose leader has gone missing. They have always lived in harmony with the land, their ancestry, and beliefs. What will they do in his absence? In this fusion of classical, jazz and new music, the community sets out to answer this very question.
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This performance is a Work In Progress presentation of a work that is being developed as a part of National Sawdust’s Artists In Residence program. We invite you to come support these world class artists and experience new art in its earliest stage. The evening will consist of a performance, followed by a Q&A with the lead artists, Helga Davis and Kaneza Schaal.
Conceived and Created by Helga Davis
Composed by Helga Davis, Ted Cruz and Alexis Marcelo
Kaneza Schaal: Director
Christopher Myers: Scenic Design
Jeanette Yew: Lighting Design
// This program is generously supported by Rick D'Avino and Opera America.
Harlem native Helga Davis is a multifaceted, critically-acclaimed artist, curator and cultural convener widely respected for her expansive creative practices. She is currently an inaugural advisor to Brown University Arts Institute, working on curatorial and programming initiatives, and a Teaching Artist/Mentor for The Park Avenue Armory Youth Corps. In Spring 2023, she was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation to write a work for children’s choir and orchestra, featuring herself as soloist and conductor. Between 2019-2022, she was a Mellon Foundation funded Creative Futures Fellow at UNC, Chapel Hill. Her eponymously named New York Public Radio podcast, Helga, now in its sixth season, unfolds as a long-form conversation engaging artists across disciplines to explore current cultural issues with rare candor.
Helga was a principal performer in the 25th anniversary revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach; in Robert Wilson and Berniece Johnson Reagon’s The Temptation of St. Anthony; Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower; and in Courtney Bryan’s Yet Unheard, among many others. As a curator, she developed performances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and recently completed a three-year position as the Visiting Curator for the Performing Arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and was awarded the Greenfield Prize in Composition. She has collaborated with Nick Cave, Claudia Rankine, David Byrne, Bill T. Jones, Solange, Glenn Ligon and many others. She serves on the Board of the Jerome Foundation.
Alexis Marcelo is a pianist from New York City cultivated in the creative and forward-thinking traditions of African-American Music. He began his studies at the Harlem School of the Arts at an early age and eventually studied composition and improvisation with Dr. Yusef Lateef at the University of Massachusetts, where he developed a unique sound rooted in Autophysiopsychic music. As an improviser, Marcelo draws inspiration from both musical and non-musical sources, which include other musicians, the audience, and the immediate environment, with the hopes of creating a soulful experience that conveys those indescribable feelings from the heart.
Marcelo has performed all over the world with multiple artists in a diverse array of genres over the years, most recently sharing the stage with saxophonists James Brandon Lewis, Adam Rudolph, Ava Mendoza, and JD Parran. He is currently performing in the New York City Metropolitan Opera’s production of Anthony Davis’s Malcolm X.
Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based artist working in theater, opera, and film. Schaal was named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and received a 2021 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Grant, 2019 United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Joyce Award, LMCC Alumni Award, 2018 Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, 2017 MAP Fund Award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and was an Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. Her project GO FORTH, premiered at Performance Space 122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Her work JACK & showed in BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and with its co-commissioners Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Schaal’s piece CARTOGRAPHY premiered at The Kennedy Center and toured to The New Victory Theater, Abu Dhabi Arts Center and Playhouse Square, OH. Her dance work, MAZE, created with FLEXN NYC, premiered at The Shed. She directed Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s BLUE at Michigan Opera Theater, and before that, Triptych composed by Bryce Dessner with libretto by Korde Arrington Tuttle, which premiered at LA Philharmonic, The Power Center in Ann Arbor, MI, BAM Opera House and Holland Festival. Schaal recently directed the world premiere of OMAR written by Rhiannon Giddens and co-composed by Giddens and Michael Abels at the Spoleto Festival USA, and its continuation at Los Angeles Opera. Her newest original work, KLII, is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center in partnership with Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and REDCAT, and was co-commissioned as part of the Eureka Commissions program by the Onassis Foundation. Schaal will develop and direct a number of upcoming works including SPLIT TOOTH with Tanya Tagaq (Luminato Festival, Canada), HUSH ARBOR with Imani Uzuri (The Momentary, AZ) and a new work with musician Bryce Dessner.
Schaal’s work has also been supported by New England Foundation for The Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, FACE Foundation Contemporary Theater grant, Theater Communications Group, and a Princess Grace George C. Wolfe Award. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.
Schaal is an Arts-in-Education advocate. Her work at the International Children’s Book Library in Munich, Germany with young asylum seekers to address migration and storytelling led to the creation of CARTOGRAPHY. Additionally, she created arts exchange platforms at three prisons in upstate New York, and has begun work on a new program for New York State’s maximum security facility for girls. Schaal’s education work has spanned from universities to community centers to public high schools; and from workshops for professional artists, to professional development training for teachers, to intergenerational collaborations between elders and teens, to in-schools work with immigrant communities. Schaal taught an Atelier course at Princeton University with Elevator Repair Service and has lectured at Yale University, CT, Wesleyan University, CT, New York University, University of The Arts, PA and Xavier, LA. In Spring 2020 she taught a course at Harvard University on theater and social practice, and she was the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham University in Fall 2021.
Christopher Myers is an artist and writer who lives in New York. While he is widely acclaimed for his work with literature for young people, he is also an accomplished fine artist who has lectured and exhibited internationally. He writes, “I’ve been asking the question lately, ‘What does it mean to be an artist whose work is rooted in the experience of global cultural exchange?”
More than the simple small-world market-driven exchanges that mark some artists, whose practices are rooted in the anthropological or outsourcing models of cultural exchange, he is interested in the aesthetic bridges that have been built organically across cultures, classes, and geographies, and has been creating work in those in-between spaces for years. His practice can be divided into two categories, work by his own hands that lives in the syncretic, the hybrid, and the improvised, and collaborations with artisans from around the globe, extending the conversation of cultural movement across continents and artistic milieus.
He has worked with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Vietnam, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, weavers in Luxor and many other artists, who he sees as all being part of one large conversation about the movement of culture, and the ways that languages are borrowed globally, traded from South to South, in order to address the specific local concerns of people that have been thrust into contexts that range far beyond their locality
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is an award-winning designer for theater, opera, dance, musical, music performances, installation and immersive experiences. As a designer she aims to create a visual environment that is organically integrated into the landscape and language of the production.
Her works have been seen across US cities and internationally at Havana (Cuba), Prague (Czech Republic), Lima (Peru), Edinburgh (Scotland), Tokyo (Japan), Graz (Austria), Shanghai (China), Paris (France), and Bloemfontein (South Africa).
In addition to lighting, Jeanette is projection designer with extensive experience designing for new works and original adaptations. Recent: In the Wake with Josh Hecht, Top Girls, Relevance (Lortel nomination) and Informed Consent with Liesl Tommy, Aya Ogawa’s Ludic Proxy (Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund), Erik Ehn’s Clover, Company XIV’s Snow White, The Civilians’ Paris Commune and In the Footprint, Matthew Paul Olmos’ So Go the Ghosts of Mexico Part One, Elizabeth Swados and Cecilia Rubino’s From the Fire (winner of the 2011 MTM: UK Musical Theatre Awards for Best New Production), and NPR’s WATER +/- with Kenny Leon.
Lastly, Jeanette is also a generative artist in devising interdisciplinary productions through contemporary puppetry aesthetics and technique. NY Times described her recent project with Target Margin, Act 4 of The Iceman Cometh as “consistently inventive”. Her immersive production, Are They Edible? premiered at La MaMa to sold-out houses and it was called “bold” and “inventive”. And Here We Are, a shadow puppet opera with composer Matthew Welch was premiere at National Sawdust in 2018. Additionally, her toy theater production of The Butcher Men was invited to the 2006 Prague Quadrennial and her digital puppetry adaptation of the Book of Genesis, MILK, was part of the Labapalooza 2007 presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse (NYC).
Jeanette is the Associate Arts Professor and Head of Lighting Design Training with NYU’s Department of Drama Production & Design Studio (P&D). Member of Woodshed Collective and Caborca. Member of USA29. Recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program.