Womanifesto Choreography by Amelia Byrd, North Carolina Dance Festival 2022
Channels of Hope
What does a world where people are free look like, and how can it be achieved? In the late, longtime Asheville resident Helen Moseley-Edington's poem, "I Dream a World," which is a take on the 1941 Langston Hughes poem of the same name, she writes of the world she dreams of, one Africans knew before ships approached their shores. She asks that readers dream of this world with her. To do so, one has to have a sense of self, which is "crucial if we are to join ourselves to the past and the future, to commune with the ancestors as well as the coming children" writes Vincent Harding in There Is a River. He refers to the formerly enslaved as "human channels of hope," the ancestors Moseley-Edington asks readers to consider.
In Channels of Hope, Moseley-Edington's granddaughter, Asheville resident LaVie Danielle Montgomery, reads her grandmother's words while choreographer and dancer Alexandra Joye Warren invokes memories and ancestors through movement. Moseley-Edington knew of this world and wanted future generations to know it, too.
PBS Black Issues Forum Season 37, Episode 3
MDC, a nonprofit based in Durham, kicks off a yearlong tour to highlight its 20th State of the South report, which helps bring about equity for communities in the South. Its CEO John Simpkins and Duke University’s Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith discuss strategies for change with host Deborah Noel. Also, JOYEMOVEMENT founder Alexandra Joye Warren and graphic designer Marcus Kiser discuss art’s impact.