Artist Statements

Artist statement by Toshi Reagon

“For my mother and me, the essential thing in our pieces is the singing. All of the musical arrangements center around the voice. To us, when you are taken from your land and stripped of rights, your name, your people, your religion, and assaulted relentlessly- your home is the sound your body can make. Your dignity rescues itself in the shelves of your instrument. From your most central place it pushes up like a pump and into service by the mechanics of your vocal chords, tongue and mouth.

The music we are working with comes from a cry of the body. In Parable we cover two hundred years of African American song traditions: Rock, Folk, Blues, Hymns, Spirituals, Funk, Soul, R&B, Electronica, 20th Century Gospel, Work Songs, Field Hollars, A capella sacred singing from SW Georgia—music and text that help you find your way in the darkness, or lead you to a river to drink, or guide you to the freedom. We are taking advantage of the complexity and richness of the music as it traveled into the wilderness and out and back into over and over again.

In Parable Of The Sower we are dealing with a 21st Century girl who knows she is in trouble. Lauren Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist preacher whose religious and musical lines come out of the 19th century and from the ancient Text of the Bible. She struggles to separate herself from her father and his followers because she intuits what we in 2016 know and must proclaim: hiding behind walls is only the illusion of safety. True safety lies in breaking down barriers, creating community, and making change.”
—Toshi Reagon

Artist statement by Eric Ting

“I first encountered Toshi Reagon at one of her legendary Joe’s Pub birthday concerts– a staple of the NYC performance calendar.
I was immediately struck by the sense of community she sparked in all gathered, wrapping them into an embrace both soulful and urgently political. She had friends performing with her that night, and it was not uncommon for audience members to join her on the small stage; by night’s end, every single person in the room was standing, swept up by song and righteous purpose.
That was the night I first heard of her almost mythical adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s seminal Afrofuturist novel Parable of the Sower, an opera written in collaboration with her mother—the incomparable Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock)— and scheduled to open the 2008 City Opera season. That production never happened, and it quietly disappeared into lore. When Meiyin Wang and Under the Radar resurrected the project and approached me to direct,
I leapt at the chance. But I couldn’t have understood the profoundly transformational effect Parable has had on
me and on all the artists and audiences that have encountered it since. It’s that strange alchemy of timeliness and timelessness that comes upon us in rare moments: a work that describes both our past and our future, capturing it in a ritual song-cycle traversing two centuries of African- American musical tradition, a tradition built upon the human response to struggle: rich, dense, purposeful. From the spiritual to the starkly political, it wrestles with questions of faith, of family, of our responsibility to the earth and to each other.
There are many reasons Parable feels like a vitally necessary work; it wrestles with life on the extremes— drought, violence, a society built on corporations, dystopia; it represents in its artists the very community we all seek to reflect on our stages; it gathers the transformational forces of its story and its music to unite audiences around distinctly human stories; and I was reminded almost instantly of that night at Joe’s Pub, of the swell of heart and spirit that Toshi tapped into from her place on stage, surrounded by artists of revolutionary power, urging us to change the world.”
— Eric Ting