Department of Music

Walking with My Ancestors is an award winning multimodal performance piece, to be offered live over Zoom, that generates fresh perspectives on the experiences of the nameless Black women, men, and children who once lingered in the dungeons of West Africa and suffered the agony of the middle passage. Based on original, firsthand research in the Ghana slave dungeons, the piece takes the audience on a ritual journey that leads to revelation and rebirth. Through live drumming, singing, dancing, and acting the performer explores how today’s racial and cultural problems connect with truths of our shared and painful pasts. The presentation concludes with a “talk-back” that allows the audience to have deepened conversations about trauma, equity, multicentricity, ghosts of slavery, and emotional justice, moving us towards the healing of our hurting communities. It is poignant and timely for our community’s and our country’s racial reckoning. Walking with My Ancestors is a story we ultimately write together about triumph over adversity, resilience, and survival.

Dr. Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum is a researcher, scholar, teacher, and performer of African and Black Atlantic music styles and traditions. Currently working on Black People, Thank You!, the third in the Walking with My Ancestors’ award-winning performance sequence, she is a professor of ethnomusicology at Illinois State University at Normal, IL. Aduonum’s methods blend creative expression, scholarship, and experimental performance; her teaching of undergraduate and graduate students is organic and original, often through call and response and creative activities. She employs de-colonialist discursive frameworks to foreground experiential approaches and performative-scholarly discourse. Aduonum is a Queen Mother in Ghana.

Sponsored by the UVA IHGC Lab in Performance Cultures & Embodied Creative Practices, with support from the UVA departments of Music and Drama.

Event link for the zoom webinar on Thursday, 3/25/2021 at 7pm is bit.ly/walkingwithmyancestors (passcode: walking)

All events are subject to change.

Contact UVA Music at music@virginia.edu or 434.924.3052.     

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