BE HOLDING // DIR BY BROOKE O'HARRA

Be Holding -- 2023 Philadelphia from Brooke O'Harra on Vimeo.

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We are excited to present an asynchronous virtual screening of  Be Holding, an original performance created by a team of professional artists in collaboration with students at Girard College. It transforms
Ross Gay's award-winning poem of the same name into a multidisciplinary, site-specific experience that combines poetry, music, choreography, and video.

Inspired by Philadelphia 76ers basketball legend "Dr." and his iconic baseline scoop in the 1980 NBA Finals, Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other.
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And might make us be reaching for eachother. 

And how that reaching might be something like joy.

Produced by Girard College, a tuition-free boarding school for underserved youth that was at the center of Philadelphia's civil rights movement, Be Holding opens the school's historic campus to the city and fosters conversation on social justice issues that continue to impact its majority Black population today.

Over two years of on-campus residencies, students collaborated with the acclaimed team of professional artists to study the themes of the work, explore how these artistic disciplines interact, and gain hands-on experience in developing a pertormance for the stage.
Be Holding is staged at center court in The Cheesman A. Herrick
Fieldhouse & Armory at Girard College in Philadelphia, PA.

Major support for Be Holding has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from The MAP Fund, which is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.