The Black (W)hole

In 2019, every member of the now award-winning Destiny Arts Center Youth Performance Company knew someone killed by violence. How they began to ask, do we remember the “gone too soon”? It’s a question at the heart of The Black (W)hole, a new, multidisciplinary performance commissioned by Destiny Arts Center in collaboration with members of Oakland’s vibrant arts community that will premiere on April 17 at The Odell Johnson Performing Arts Center at Laney College.

The Black (W)hole combines hip hop and vertical dance, poetic elegies, video installations, and mixed-media public artworks to honor six young people who died before age 32 in and around Oakland. “We commissioned Marc Bamuthi Joseph to come home to Oakland and help us create a new, embodied language to memorialize youth in our city who have died too-soon. The Black (W)hole is a vehicle for resistance and spiritual renewal that will show how public rituals can affirm cultural memory and help us mourn and heal,” explains Sarah Crowell, the Center’s Artistic Director.

The Black (W)hole includes the Award-Winning Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC), together with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Brett Cook, and Yoram Savion of YAKfilms,The Elders Project, and BANDALOOP, DAYPC Co-Artistic Directors Sarah Crowell and Rashidi Omari, and a team of powerful collaborators, performance and art installations and a dance/theater piece for the six young “gone too soon” ancestors, that have been guided by conversations with their family members.