Ladies Ring Shout 2.0

Ladies Ring Shout 2.0 is a Black feminist quality-of-life performance project, first created and performed in 2011. This restaging/reimagining, features HPP’s artistic core alongside an intergenerational community cast of Black women/femmes who have worked in collaboration with HPP, to devise a new iteration of the work. Ladies Ring Shout 2.0 focuses on themes critical to Black women and femmes' lives such as representation, love and relationships, scars/trauma, work-life balance, quality of life, nurturing and parenting, spirituality, healing, and defining our communities of care. Creative writing and embodied exercises are supplemented with experiments in other artistic mediums including collective play with still image, video, audio and reading excerpts from the work of relevant BIPOC women writers and poets. This work is in partnership with First Church of the Brethren.

Credit: Mamadou Sewa Bah

LRS 2.0 Collaborating Artists

Paige Brown

Paige Brown (she/her) lovingly refers to herself as “arts-adjacent”.

As Development Coordinator and Dark Matter Residency Coordinator for Elastic Arts, she constantly finds herself in awe of the talent and adventurousness of the artists she is privileged to witness and support.  Although she more frequently positions herself contently in the audience of arts performances and exhibitions, a vocalist, pianist and composer herself, she is navigating a journey of developing the inner mechanisms and communal connections to deepen and externalize her own artistic practice more fully.

She currently finds joy/peace by communing with plants and other beings, experimenting with simple recipes in the kitchen, and catalyzing/witnessing the growth of artists, students, and others.

She currently finds challenge in her quest to improve at the art of taking things slow.

Ladies Ring Shout will be her first dramatic appearance, and she is honored to have been invited to participate in this work.

Elizabeth Nichole Griffin

Elizabeth Nichole Griffin (She/Her), aka Liz is a native of Chicago.  Southside, stand up!  In her creative space she is an Event Curator that has curated events for Whole Foods, The Black Harvest Film Festival, Jane Addams Hull House, Thresholds, Chicago Youth Centers and Freedom Home Academy.  Liz is also a certified yoga instructor and creator of Squarely Rooted Yoga.  She is passionate about community weaving and restoration, radical self-care and self-love. She is currently working with Teamwork Englewood and Grow Greater Englewood to bring yoga and meditation programming to the Englewood community.  

Although she is a lover of theater.  This will be Elizabeth’s first time dipping her toe into performing on stage.  Outside of her elementary school 5th grade musical performance. Smile!  She is a foodie that enjoys walks/bike rides on the lakefront, traveling, art in various modalities, new adventures and live music.  

Quotes that have inspired her life:

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” ― Angela Davis

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” ― Audre Lorde

Cat Mahari

Cat Mahari’s practice is built from a richly layered body history, stemming from an archive of research, physical training and intent to manifest an intellectual, material and informal legacy of Blk liberation through documentation. By examining personal marks and socio-genealogical maps, she explores inner and outer environments. Her film Sugar in the Raw which premiers autumn 2022, is a surrealist-inspired exploration of Blk intimacy, trust, and touch via Chicago House and Stepping. As a 2022 Dark Matter Residency artist, she is helming a collaborative multi-media and medium installation on Blkness, Violence, anti-Blkness and AfroSino relationality. Additionally, mahari is preparing Blk Ark: the impossible manifestation - a multimodal reflective of marronage, anarchism, and play to be completed 2025. In 2021 she was named the City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Awardee in Dance and received a 2021 3Arts award in dance. Her works include the Afro Sci-fi Krump film Imprints & Traces, and multi-disciplinary performance BAM! for which she received a CSF Generative Performing Artist Fellowship. BAM! is an immersive ensemble work, focusing on Blackness, Amerikkka, and violence. Her post-disciplinary work, the mixtape series violent/break vol i and vol ii, has received national and international development support at Brink Festival (London), High Concept Labs (Chicago), and Imir Scene Kunst (Norway). Mahari is a culture bearer of Hip Hop and House; former member of the Krump family Gool, with a BFA in dance performance from the Conservatory of Music & Dance at the University of Missouri - Kansas City and M.A. in performance, practice, and research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Production Crew

Lighting team

Margaret Nelson

Devonte Washington 

J'kqwan Smith 

Teniyah Hall 

Aidan Smith 

Credit: Loren Toney