National Sawdust Presents A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING Next Month

National Sawdust presents A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING, acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and 2018 National Sawdust Artist-in-Residence JOJO ABOT's immersive and experiential opera, made in collaboration with five-time Grammy winning musician and restorative arts devotee Esperanza Spalding. In this world premiere work, JOJO ABOT, an Ewe woman from Ghana, West Africa, references indigenous practices in which the feminine is a conduit for the divine. Densely layering JOJO ABOT's voice with vocals and instrumentals from Esperanza Spalding, A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING uses the Meyer Sound spatial technologies installed in National Sawdust to envelop audiences in an inter-dimensional soundscape. The performance takes place at National Sawdust (80 N. 6th Street, Brooklyn) September 23 at 7:30pm. Tickets can be purchased here.

A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING was created, directed, and composed by JOJO ABOT during a long season of uncertainty, separation, and global unrest, building on JOJO ABOT's exploration of spirituality, and incorporating spalding's lineages and practices of restorative music. As their vocals coalesce around visuals, and aromas, dissonance becomes a provocation towards harmony. JOJO ABOT says of their collaboration, "esperanza and I met before COVID and have been lucky enough to build a sisterhood. When we sing together, I always enjoy the frequency in which her voice sits and how it interplays with mine, how it speaks a different language even if it's saying the exact thing I'm saying. I'm really excited to see where her ancestry meets mine, where her understanding of music meets mine, where her healing explorations through sound meet mine."

A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING embraces opera's potential as a narrative, vocal-centric, heightened musical form, while challenging rigid preconceptions of it: stylistically genre-bending and technologically innovative, the work engages audience members as co-creators of a mutable and multi-sensorial experience rather than spectators of something fixed. The opera opens into the story of an omnipresent, multidimensional god who is born of love and might, manifested in wholeness. She begins life with confidence but eventually hits a wave of uncertainty and loses sight of self, purpose and awe, longing to return home-a space of safety and love. In stillness induced by a state of helplessness, she takes a moment to alchemize her journey, opening herself to a well of gratitude and hope. Here in her inner temple, she begins to re-member, reconnect, heal and regenerate, birthing a far more evolved and expansive version of self.

"This is the journey we've been going on for the last couple of years," explains JOJO ABOT. "The turbulence starts to hit and we lose sight of the beauty, the love, the magic of it all. And we need a nudge of spiritual invigoration. In the pause we experienced in the last two years, we've had to dig deep and hear the inner self, hear that old mind: listen really deeply to what harmony looks like in our lives. What living at peace with our community and the earth we live on look like. And to ask: is there space for evolution?"

For the first time ever, National Sawdust's Meyer Sound spatial sound system serves as a tool for inducing a state of expansive presence, awareness, and ascension while amplifying a call to (re)turn to an ancient self that is in unity with all of creation. JOJO ABOT understands the human body as, itself, a primary technology, rejecting the idea of technology as a new appendage. Rather, A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING suggests, it is intrinsic to the human spirit. In the work's merging of these old and new technologies, woman and machine come together in sacred co-creation.

A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING is part of National Sawdust's Fall 2022 season, bringing musical and multidisciplinary artists from around the world to its state-of-the-art Williamsburg, Brooklyn home to share ambitious new explorations. Throughout the season, the organization demonstrates its commitment to mentoring artists and fostering dynamic and timely collaborations, often in projects that entwine musicality and considerations of social justice. Many works emerge from an America and a world experiencing intersecting crises and urgent calls for change-and respond with themes of healing, metamorphosis, activism, and hope.

Major institutional support for The Future Is... 2021-22 season at National Sawdust is provided by private support from the Howard Gilman Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, Alphadyne Foundation, Art Mentor Foundation, Citi, and Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust, and the Arts Forward program of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council in addition to significant leadership support from the National Sawdust Board of Directors. National Sawdust is a proud Meyer Sound Experience partner.

Paola Prestini is the Kris Sebastian & Alberto Cribiore Artistic Director Chair for National Sawdust's Seasons 7 (2021-22 ) & 8 (2022-23).

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