The Toni Morrison Project

Friday, March 24, 2023 @ 8:00pm

McCarter Theatre Center (Berlind Theater)
91 University Place, Princeton, NJ 08540

Multi-disciplinary Artists Mame Diarra Samantha Speis & Daniel Alexander Jones, along with their collaborators welcome you into a living ritual, as a witness & as a participant. Sourced from their respective performance & devotional practices, there will be elements of spontaneous duet alongside pointed solos and congregational voicing. 

In the spirit of the great artist for whom the work is made, Spies and Jones venture to the edges to listen for the voices, rich and fertile, asking us to risk seeing ourselves, our histories, and our presence anew. 

Audiences are invited to this first-look of original commissioned performances - unique works-in-progress that are the result of collaborations between Associate Artistic Director and curator Nicole A. Watson, and Autumn Womack, curator of the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory and assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. These sharings are part of a robust calendar of the campus-wide programming celebrating the acclaimed author Toni Morrison’s (1931–2019) life and legacy.  

The artists visited the University’s Toni Morrison Papers archive, a large trove of personal papers, letters, manuscripts and objects that were acquired by the university in 2014 to inspire their original creations.  

The performances will be presented in McCarter’s intimate Berlind Theater Rehearsal Studio. Space is Limited.

About the Exhibition

“Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” which opens at Princeton University Library's Milberg Gallery on February 22, 2023 (through June 4, 2023), will anchor a series of programs that include an art exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge with the renowned artist Alison Saar; newly commissioned performances responding to Morrison’s work presented by McCarter Theatre and Princeton University Concerts; a landmark three-day symposium that brings together over thirty writers and artists to reflect on Morrison’s relationship to the archive; public tours of Sites of Memory; children’s programming; a spring lecture series; and undergraduate courses on Morrison’s work.