Shrouded

//shrouded\ is an immersive dance performance and living poetic sculpture that casts the body as an archive of memory, resistance, and transformation. Rooted in Black queer temporalities, the work features performers encased in flowing brown silks who move through slow, durational states of concealment and revelation to enact a "poetics of opacity." Developed as a site-responsive communal ritual, the performance transforms architectural landscapes into a responsive technological ecosystem, weaving silk veils, reflective surfaces, and sensor-driven "Algorithmic Choreography Fields" into an environment that listens and responds to audience movement in real time. By treating the body as a living record rather than an object, the work invites audiences into a shared field of remembrance, where mourning is alchemized into a coexistent, abundant future.

The production's original sound design, by Everett Saunders, Sound Designer/Composer, forms the sonic architecture of this responsive ecosystem — translating audience movement and the performers' durational states into a living sound field that breathes alongside the silk, light, and sensor work, deepening the ritual's atmosphere of concealment, revelation, and collective remembrance.

float

Marjani Forté-Saunders developed "float.," a meditation and a study on the wondrous. In her words, “the word ‘wondrous’ evokes a sense of awe and admiration, often used to describe something extraordinarily beautiful, remarkable, or inspiring…The intuitive human entity is full of wonders.”

"float." contemplates the Zen Buddhist concept of clouds and water: to wondrously navigate the hurdles of a journey with a malleable and steady advancement. Through her creative, scientific, and technological research for “float.,” Forté-Saunders engages the preternatural wonders of our central nervous systems weathering infinite change: love, loss, sensation, and—prayerfully—lift.

Forté-Saunders is a mother, choreographer, performer, community organizer, and a three-time Bessie Award winner. She received the Dance Magazine Harkness Award in 2020. She is in steady collaboration with her partner, composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee), and the duo has emerged as 7NMS| Marjani Forte & Everett Saunders (7NMS| M + E), with awarded residencies at the Petronio Residency Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Academy of Music, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. They are recipients of the 2021 National Dance Production Grant for their new work "PROPHET." She is the Visioning Founder of Art x Power, a platform dedicated to fostering purpose and innovation by investing in and building resilient futures for Black artists.

SpeakMyMind

SpeakMyMind is a declaration of ownership of all that is Black girl. Under the direction of Michele Byrd-McPhee, SpeakMyMind gathers women across generations and geographies to honor the roots of Hip-Hop culture and the communities that birthed it. Both a performance and a declaration, SpeakMyMind invites audiences to an evening of culture.  Integral to the performance, the sound design draws from the foundations of Hip-Hop, translating its musical language, textures, and traditions into a theatrical soundscape that moves in dialogue with the performers. Commissioned by Works & Process and developed through LaunchPAD residencies at Bethany Arts Community, Catskill Mountain Foundation, and The Kennedy Center. Performances have been presented at the Guggenheim, Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, and other leading venues. Supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Mid Atlantic Arts.

Raw, bold, and unapologetically alive, SpeakMyMind bursts onto the stage with the rhythm and resilience of Black womanhood.  Evolving from the acclaimed ‘Black Dancing Bodies Project’ this powerful work is rooted in street and club dance forms, along with spoken word and the art of freestyle. SpeakMyMind is a series of choreopoems - a form created by author and activist Ntozake Shange - that transforms movement into memory, language into rhythms, and expression into liberation.  

Keeper of Sadness

Keeper of Sadness is an immersive performance and living archive centering the experiences of Black Women.

The work brings together movement, sound, and storytelling to explore grief as something ancestral, collective, and deeply personal. It reflects on the intergenerational impacts of trauma, societal narratives, and historical erasure while holding space for memory, resilience, and reclamation.Keeper of Sadness invites audiences into a shared encounter with grief. Not as something to resolve, but as something to witness, carry, transmute and understand on a deeper level.

Keeper of Sadness offers an intimate exploration of the ways grief is carried, remembered, and passed on across generations.Through performance and environment, the work considers how Black life is shaped by forms of loss that are both visible and unseen. It holds space for experiences that are often carried but rarely named, and asks what it means to witness them collectively.The work draws attention to the ways memory, erasure, and survival are intertwined, using storytelling as a site of remembrance and resistance. Everett Saunders designed the sound score, carrying us through multiple avenues of Black spirituality, culture, and thought. His sonic experience informed us of the world this grief lives in.  We heard how different generations of Black folk have processed the trauma America has given to them.