Memory Fleet is a traveling performance and archive project that remembers and celebrates the living memories of the Black people who have mothered lead artist, Jasmine Hearn. It will be experienced as a site-specific performance, album, feast, online archive, anthological catalog, and a mercurial system of somatic, embodied sound and dance practices. Presented by DiverseWorks, Memory Fleet premieres April 6, 2024 as a durational dance theater performance that travels throughout the city.
It will later tour to Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA (2024 -2025), Dance Place in Washington, D.C. (2024 -2025), New York Live Arts in New York, NY (2023 -2026), and Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens, NY (2025 -2026). Each site will activate the same methodology from its Houston iteration but engage the oral histories and living memories of key figures in the dance field who have mothered Jasmine in each city.
Caretakers of Land/Land Acknowledgement: Texas was attached to Antarctica during the Pangea era. Before 1837 when the city was “founded,” this land was stewarded by and home to the Atakapa-Ishak, Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, and Sana peoples and a multitude of animals, forests, waters, and life.