BE HOLDING | IN SEARCH OF BLACK GENIUS, JUSTICE, AND JOY

2/2/2024

Our Third Thursday event for February explores BE HOLDING, an original performance created by poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, new music ensemble Yarn/Wire, and director Brooke O’Harra. Inspired by Philadelphia 76ers basketball legend “Dr. J” and his iconic baseline scoop in the 1980 NBA Finals, Be Holding meditates on America’s history of racial violence in search of Black genius, justice, and 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.

This conversation brings together key creative voices including poet and performer Yolanda Wisher, poet and performer David Gaines, director/artist Brooke O'Harra, and Ross Gay himself.

MEET THE SPEAKERS

YOLANDA WISHER

Poet, musician, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters and produced their debut album Doublehanded Suite, released in 2022. Her writing has been featured in numerous literary journals as well as The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC Radio, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and the Poetry Foundation's Audio Poem of the Day series. Wisher has been commissioned to create new works of poetry by ICA Philadelphia, Fabric Workshop and Museum, HealthSpark Foundation, The Public Interest Law Center, Philadelphia Peace Plaza Committee, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, and Philadelphia Jazz Project, among others. Wisher has been a poet in residence at Hedgebrook and Aspen Words, and she has taught poetry at K-12 schools, community organizations, prisons, social service agencies, and colleges and universities. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change and was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow in 2022. She works as a Senior Curator at Monument Lab.

BROOKE O'HARRA

Brooke O’Harra (she/her) is a director, artist and performer. She co-founded The Theater of a Two-headed Calf. O’Harra developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 La Mama ETC, 2013, River to River Festival).
O’Harra conceived, directed, scripted, and performed in the Dyke Division’s live serial Room for Cream (Four seasons - 28 episodes) at La Mama, ETC 2008-10 and at the New Museum 2017. Brooke and the Dyke Division were also featured in The New Museum’s 40th Anniversary Show “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.”
For several years she has been creating and performing a nine-part directing/performance project, I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you. Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an 8-hour performance that uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine.
Brooke is the Co-director of the Performance Intensive http://www.performanceintensive.org.

ROSS GAY

Ross Gay is interested in joy.

Ross Gay wants to understand joy.
Ross Gay is curious about joy.
Ross Gay studies joy.
Something like that.
~
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays--The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.

DAVID A GAINES

David A. Gaines is a writer, filmmaker and actor born and based in Philadelphia. His work examines Blackness, masculinity, Christianity and mental health through an intersectional lens. Dave is an award-winning, nationally touring poetry performer, a fellow of The Watering Hole and BlackStar Filmmaker Lab, and a Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County; and his work has been featured in the National Black Arts Festival, Button Poetry, Write About Now, VICE Media, among many others. When not writing, performing, or orchestrating films, you can find Dave teaching poetry to Philly youth, playing narrative-centric video games or spending quality time with nature.

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