Ritual I

Witness

Grounding

We call on others to join us, as witnesses to the wanton killings of Black people by police officers. 

We invite them into a community of co-conspirers, so that we can find healing with each other. 

We support each other through our words, music and visions.

Co-social Impact Director Gwen Carr offers today’s grounding.

Mantras

I am healing, I am healing alongside others. 

Together, we can do anything.

Questions

Where does forgiveness sit within you?
Where has it been withheld from you?
How does it impact our ability to see & feel one another?
Is it relevant to our communal breath?
These questions are offered by the Black Liberation Collective. View their Liberation Vocabulary, crafted to accompany the project.

Self-led Activations

Text Making: Evening Together

Take a few moments to reflect on Enrico Riley’s painting Keep on Breathing.

After meditating on Enrico’s paintings, librettist and poet, Vievee Francis wrote:
“Evening, together we can do anything”
for Movement One of The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist.

Take another moment to reflect on Enrico’s painting.

Now, write your own phrase or sentence that encourages others to join you.

You can use text. You can use drawing. You can use music. You can use one, two or all three.
Here are prompts to participate in this ritual.

Image Making: Keep on Breathing

After reading Vievee Francis’ words ‘keep breathing anyway / any way we can,’ composer Jonathan Berger set the text to music. Take a moment to listen to his composition.

As he meditated on Jonathan’s composition, Enrico made drawings and paintings for The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist. One of Enrico’s favorite techniques is automatic drawing. He describes it as such:

Automatic drawing is a process of allowing the unconscious or subconscious mind the agency to generate a drawn expression. These expressions can have nameable images and or unnameable marks. To engage in this process a person needs only to have a drawing device, a surface to draw on, and an open mind. It can help to keep your drawing device in contact with the surface and to keep your drawing hand moving. 

  • We are going to make automatic drawings now. 

  • Go to or place in front of you the surface you will be drawing on. 

  • Get your drawing device.

  • Play the following recording.

  • Draw and continue to draw until the recording stops.

Music Making

Take a few moments to meditate on Vievee Francis’ words:

keep breathing anyway
any way we can

After sitting with these words, composer Jonathan Berger wrote music for them. He describes his process in this way: 

For me, transmuting words into music involves two parallel processes. First is finding meaning in the text. Second is entirely disregarding meaning and instead deeply listening to the sound of the words. Ingesting and savoring the phonemes, feeling the plosives and fricatives, the sounds of the words, devoid of intent causes the melody to emerge.

We are going to write our own melody for Vievee’s words. 

  • Get your recording device and place it near you. 

  • Gather a sounding tool. This could be your body or voice, a musical instrument or an object nearby.

  • Take a few moments to meditate on the meaning of Vievee Francis’s words, and if you like, write that meaning down somewhere or just inscribe it into your memory

  • Now, get your sounding tool, and disregarding the meaning of the words, take a few moments. 

  • Slowly read or sing the words and as you do so, make sounds with your sounding tool.

  • You are now going to make a recording of your music. 

  • Press record on your device.

  • Sing or play your sounds to

keep breathing anyway
any way we can

Visualization