Black Magic

June 15, 2018
Black Magic
EASTSIDE, 7:30PM
Micia Mosely
Tickets: $12-$20 sliding scale, NOTA
Ticket Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-magic-tickets-45186946373

Black Magic is an interactive and interdisciplinary performance that lifts black queer voices to resist anti-Blackness and homophobia and reimagines new possibilities for the twenty first century and beyond. Using humor, poetry, music and photography, the audience will help shape a path to freedom through resistance. Black Magic is a reconnecting with our ancestral knowing through performance in order to navigate this current social and political moment using an artivist (art+activist) approach to create and express our truths.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Creating Queer Community Program

BIOGRAPHIES

Ganessa James is a singer, songwriter, and electric bass player. As a New York City kid with immigrant parents from Central America and the Caribbean, she grew up listening to music from all over the world: country, soca, garage classics, soul, high-life, merengue, punta, zouk. The sounds seeped into Ganessa’s ears and kicked off a life-long fascination with music. As a tween, she sang in acapella groups.  As a teenager, she bought herself a bass and learned how to play, guitar followed shortly thereafter. Reared as a musician on the independent music scene in Brooklyn, she found her way into bands that would take her on a fantastic musical journey. She has toured throughout the US and Europe and has played played on stages from Coachella to NY’s own Summerstage with artists such as Saul Williams, JOI, Tamar-Kali, and Toshi Reagon. She’s one half of the band Onliest, formed with her twin Tiffany James to indulge and proliferate harmonic joy.  She loves working collaboratively with other independent musicians, and using her music to support social justice organizations. Her EP of rather tender love songs, ‘Believer’ is available on the iTunes and the Spotify and the like. She’s excited to be here repping and delighting in joy and resistance. Find out more at ganessajames.com

Sólás B. Lalgee is a Richmond native and arts advocate, was nurtured by an art-based family. He attended the School of the Arts- San Francisco, Oakland Youth Chorus, and graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. He was a Presidential Scholar of the Arts awardee in 1997 and recipient of several awards by the Society of Singers, The GRAMMY Foundation, and Young Arts Program. Lalgee’s credits include studying, working, and performing with Ledisi, Zendaya Coleman, Latoya London, Mooncandy live house music ensemble, Jennifer Johns, Valerie Troutt, Nicole Klaymoon, and The Embodiment Project. As a Vocal Instructor, Lalgee has enjoyed working with singers of all age to help find their true voice. As an arts instructor, his pride in work stems from helping others to get greater creative echelons and integrated disciplines.

Micia Mosely, a comedian and educator who earned her Ph.D. in education from U.C. Berkeley, keeps audiences learning & laughing in a variety of contexts and venues. Mosely’s one-woman show, “Where My Girls At?” (an off-Broadway comedy about Black lesbians) was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award (Best Solo Performance). Currently, she performs her brand of social justice stand up comedy across the country. Mosely spends the majority of her time as the Executive Director of The Black Teacher Project, an organization committed to recruiting, developing and sustaining Black teachers for schools in the United States. Learn more at www.miciamosely.com & www.blackteacherproject.org.

Marvin K. White, MDiv, is a graduate of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA and the inaugural Public Theologian in Residence (’17-’18) at First Church Berkeley. ​He is the author of four collections of poetry published by RedBone Press: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the two Lammy-nominated collections last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. His poetry has been anthologized in The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets; My Brothers Keeper; Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians: New Gay Writing; Things Shaped in Passing; Sojourner: Writing in the Age of AIDS; Bum Rush the Page; Role Call; and Think Again, as well as other local and national publications. He is the co-editor of If We Have to Take Tomorrow: HIV, Black Men & Same Sex Desire. His poetry has been adapted for stage at San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros and he has performed his work himself at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as a part of their 2014 BAN7 Festival. As a former member of the critically acclaimed theater troupe The Pomo Afro Homos’ he has performed nationally and internationally. White is cofounder of B/GLAM (Black Gay Letters and Arts Movement), a Bay Area, California organization whose goal was to preserve, present and incubate black gay artistic expressions. A public theologian and community-based artist, he is articulating a vision of social, prophetic and creative justice through his work as a poet, artist, teacher, facilitator, activist, community organizer, preacher, homemaker, cake baker, and Facebook Statustician.

Tanya O. Williams is an educator, facilitator, and burgeoning photographer who has had her work featured on the Timeout.com New York and 92y.org websites.  As an educator, Tanya seeks to create spaces for people to be seen, know and appreciated as their authentic self and as a photographer, she seeks to capture people’s authenticity and essence in her photographs.  Because the essence of all humans are beautiful, she is drawn to portraiture and seeks to keep developing opportunities for her photography to capture and elicit more joy.