In celebration of Opening Night, Express Your Yes invites us to embark on a journey inward to explore the limitlessness of our identity through collective vibrational exchange. This special edition Silent Disco features a legendary lineup of DJs, poets, and MCs coming at you LIVE through headphones provided by Quiet Coyote and Whoa Silent Disco. This co-created space encourages the activation of joy, desire, and pleasure. We hope that you’re able to tap into a deeper realm of self-love and gratitude as you move, groove, play, and explore the disco! You can also expect art making, guided healing practices, improv, games, toys, and more!
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Enter the world of art & activism! Visit the Artivist Bazaar! Explore a multimodal, multisensory collaborative installation featuring pairs of Michigan artists and organizations who are pillars of intersectional justice. Ignite your taste buds at a free vegan buffet, donated by generous, glorious local restaurants to raise your vibration! This special Annex activation features an interactive community dreams visioning board for our collective future centered in love, inclusion, awareness, mutual aid, and co-liberation! This is a call to unify the tribes! Love is the uniform of our (creative nonviolent) Revolution!
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Curaga is an installation by Flint artist Terra Lockhart. The work is Terra’s sculptural response to themes explored in Sabetye’s FORT PREMONITION and Supercoolwicked’s “Negro, Spiritual.” Both performances explore ideas of home, safety, shelter, spiritual growth, and weaving a future from the threads of relationships and past experiences. Terra’s work reacts to the natural surroundings of Ingalls Mall, creating an organic shelter for attendees to consider their concept of home, temporary and permanent. Her design was influenced by different homes in the natural world, including shells, nests, and trees.
Lockhart, also known as Walking Graffiti, is a mixed-media artist of many mediums born and raised in Flint, MI. Her work mixes bright colors, organic shapes, objects found in nature and the surreal to build pieces that reflect the constant process of change, the connection between all living things, and preserving and protecting nature among other themes. She currently resides in a house in the woods with her partner Micah, their two cats (Maggie and Casio), and her many pet insects.
Join Shua Group & Friends in a playful, curious experience through movement and sound on the Power Center Lawn. The event begins with warming up and exploring unique animal bodies through group sounding, moving easily on the soft grass, and activating expressive spines. Then, the group will expand outward to playful interactions with the space and others – gliding and flowing through the lawn and building group interactions. Along the way, participants can get to know themself, one another and, perhaps, shift the way the Power Center lawn is known and experienced. Also…wear a hat if possible!
Shua Group: @shuagroup | shuagroup.org
Experience the grounding power of Ahya Simone’s ethereal music at Top of the Park this summer. Detroit-based Simone is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, and harpist, whose many pronged practice is bound by an exploration of Black identity, aesthetic, and community building. Her music brings the classical stylings of the harp firmly into the 21st century, a showcase for her versatility in genres ranging from electronic music and jazz to R&B and soul. Her single “Frostbite” is gorgeous and haunting, a meditation on feeling isolated while longing for connection and belonging. She has performed extensively in Detroit, as well as nationally and abroad and is a featured artist in Showing Up Showing Out, a film dedicated to the legacy and future of Motown. Simone has also been recognized by the Sundance/Knight Foundation, Detroit Narrative Agency, and Kresge Arts in Detroit. In addition to her music, she is also the creator, co-writer, and director of the upcoming fictional web series, Femme Queen Chronicles, a story of four Black trans women in Detroit.
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A2SF welcomes SABETYE, the electronic music/DJ project of Detroit-born saylem mississippi celeste (they/themme), a place-based Transformative Justice Practitioner who utilizes art, facilitation, and sound for collective liberation and healing. As SABETYE (Suh-Bet-Tea), they create an experiential listening environment that offers an intentional space for healing and freedom. At A2SF, they will be performing FORT PREMONITION, an experimental blend of sounds that are an homage to particular moments in time when celeste leaned on sonic healing for solace, inspiration, and guidance. Described as an ephemeral container of care, rest, resilience, and home space, FORT PREMONITION charts celeste’s journey toward becoming a disc jockey, quilter, anti-capitalist, womanist, friend, lover, family member, and other roles in which they express facets of joy and love. This iteration of FORT PREMONITION is not to be missed, as SABETYE will be joined by friends for an experience that utilizes live vocalists, dance, electronic sound collage, DJing, original music, visual stimuli, and accessible/interactive elements to invoke a collective experience of expression and joy.
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Multidisciplinary artist Supercoolwicked brings her captivating contemporary R&B to Top of the Park this summer. Based in Detroit, Supercoolwicked crafts live performances, film concepts, choreography, and more from her home studio The DaughtaShip, with the intent to honor her inner child, find collective freedom, and preserve the traditions and historical narratives of African American peoples. She has worked with everyone from Esperanza Spalding and Tunde Olaniran to Ian Finklestein and ZDBT and is also a politically-engaged and environmentally-minded activist, which draws a line directly to her latest work: Negro, Spiritual. Both the name of her forthcoming debut album and a special performance crafted with artist/climate activist Ash Arder for the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History’s inaugural Energy Earth Month programming, the project aims to honor the historical significance of the Negro spiritual while experimenting with the many types of music developed since the forced migration of enslaved Africans to America. With a depth of meaning, intention, and artistic power, her performance at Top of the Park is sure to be emotionally moving and visually stunning, a delight for all the senses.
rsvp » watch supercoolwicked »
Join us for an evening of ritual and return, grounded in playful practices to jostle the way we intellectually think and feel about reality. This inaugural Community Council conversation aims to make a case for radical investment in de-commodied, creative-centric “neutral third spaces” and a pilot program to fund 27 Cultural Ambassadors (Civic Flitters if you’re indigo hip) which would include a guaranteed basic income, “A UBI To Live Your Why.” Let’s drop below the surface together into the vast interconnected web where we are one entangled quantum soup, in contact with aliens & ancestors, ourselves and each other. We’ll conclude the evening with Community Flow–a collaborative improvisational music dance art sacred play creative bop jam, no experience necessary.
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