A Screening of Shirley Graham Du Bois’ Tom-Tom featuring Les Angles Mortes.
Artistic Director: Julie Richard
In 1932 Shirley Graham Du Bois composed the opera Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro. Perhaps the first opera ever written by a Black woman, it premiered to wide acclaim before fading into history, the score missing until rediscovered in 2001 in the archives at Harvard University as part of W. E. B. Dubois’ papers, the husband of Shirley. This monumental and important work, moving from Africa to a slave plantation to Harlem in the 1920s is now ready to take its proper place as both an essential piece of music and a touchstone in the history of Black American creativity. Under the artistic direction of Julie Richard, a Haitian-Canadian composer, musician and historian of Black women composers, we have produced, in video form, a new and reimagined staging of Tom-Tom, bringing it into dialogue with a contemporary aspect of the Black experience and revealing its distinctive artistic qualities. Featuring a choir, an orchestra, dancers, musicians and lead singers. DJ ANDY EX is Andy Moor from The Ex and will be closing out the night with an eclectic, way-too-danceable curation from the copious vaults of his music-collecting obsession.
With AIM
Les Angles Mortes, Tom-Tom + DJ ANDY EX
A Screening of Shirley Graham Du Bois’ Tom-Tom featuring Les Angles Mortes.
Artistic Director: Julie Richard
In 1932 Shirley Graham Du Bois composed the opera Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro. Perhaps the first opera ever written by a Black woman, it premiered to wide acclaim before fading into history, the score missing until rediscovered in 2001 in the archives at Harvard University as part of W. E. B. Dubois’ papers, the husband of Shirley. This monumental and important work, moving from Africa to a slave plantation to Harlem in the 1920s is now ready to take its proper place as both an essential piece of music and a touchstone in the history of Black American creativity. Under the artistic direction of Julie Richard, a Haitian-Canadian composer, musician and historian of Black women composers, we have produced, in video form, a new and reimagined staging of Tom-Tom, bringing it into dialogue with a contemporary aspect of the Black experience and revealing its distinctive artistic qualities. Featuring a choir, an orchestra, dancers, musicians and lead singers. DJ ANDY EX is Andy Moor from The Ex and will be closing out the night with an eclectic, way-too-danceable curation from the copious vaults of his music-collecting obsession.
With AIM