Taking the Road with Ebony Noelle Golden’s 125th and Freedom
“Tell me, who’s walking this road to freedom … I’m going there!”
Before making my way to experience Ebony Noelle Golden’s 125th and Freedom — a durational (12noon to 5pm), processional, choreo-ritual performance — I opened my email from a bed cluttered with clothes and books, after another late night of culture, shenanigans, and subway tunnel delays to receive my coordinates. As promised, an email was waiting in my inbox from Ebony Noelle Golden, founder of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, letting the “tribe” know we were to meet up at 125th Street and 1st Avenue, under the bridge — a place more known for secrets, exits, and life less polished for shine. I was struck by the communal naming in the email. We were now “tribe,” not audience. Ebony encouraged each of us to witness, engage, sing, walk, and strategize in her intro email. Tribe members were also advised on appropriate clothing and footwear, possible restroom pitstop locations, and given instructions on how to share our experience on social media in live time … #125thandfreedom.
Once I got to our beginning at a confluence of traffic exits and overpasses at the crossroads, I found my tribe — visually stunning company members wearing black and adorned in metallic face paint and funky accessories, and those of us present to witness, engage, and strategize. First Nation natives with ancestral ties to the land before Columbus’s invasive anti-discovery sang an opening ritual while the performers marched in formation to meet us. Though most wore black, one woman dressed in white from head to toe, carrying an ancestral walking stick, moved with focused intention, channeling our collective memory of Harriet Tubman’s life story. She became our General and Moses, going down the lines of company members and initiating a ring shout to open our conversation between times — at once inside history, present, and future. This processional and ritual from near the East River to the Hudson along 125th Street in Harlem was about emancipation, the kind of freedom made by taking up space and marking home with a radical love and resilience, drawing on generations of fierce courage.
This time, our road, marked by gentrification and counter-narratives of Black legacy, opened up for us on sidewalks and at intersections, including street vendors, those without homes, those hurrying away to the next agenda item in the hustle, those laughing, signifyin’, and lounging on a sun-drenched Sunday on Harlem streets. We were asked to share where we are from, connecting our birth cities and other places of residence to Harlem. We remembered, mourned, reclaimed, and celebrated sparked by Ebony’s visionary choreography and poetic incantations, protest songs, chants, and communal rituals.
We told stories about our cultural losses, standing in front of the now-vacant lot where Lenox Lounge once lived full with jazz and story and survival songs made real with pulsing humanity in an improvisational communion from 1938–2017. We stood in front of performers carrying glass bowls of sacred, sweet basil mixed with cool water to spiritually clean ourselves on the journey. We gathered around trees boxed inside concrete to share our stories of resilience while living in a state of constant upheaval and change. We crossed paths with the annual African American Day Parade, and it was a conversation. One of the parade speakers spoke of self-determination and our communal responses to state sanctioned violence against our lives, calling it “street corner resources” as the 125th and Freedom tribe walked onward. Some watching the parade pass joined us for a while, dancing along to the rhythms made by our voices and hand claps.
Throughout the durational performance, there were stops at important Harlem locations for a retelling of history, welcoming us to consider ways to transform the possibilities for now that do not mean losing our sense of belonging to the bus-loads of tourists we’ve learned to move around and through. It was popular education and community building, a space for shared grief and love, a walk deeply rooted in our becoming. And it was funky in that way family cook-outs, block parties, drum circles, and House music dance ciphers can be funky, especially with company members on sax, djembe, and tambourine adding to the rhythm throughout.
Those familiar with Ebony’s work will discover continuity with the site-specific, processional, and ritual performance works of years prior alongside a deeply satisfying and insightful evolution of her growing repertoire. Those new to her work will likely be moved to activate ritual and space in community with Ebony and her collaborators again. In a time when many feel a sense of urgency, 125th and Freedom asks us to show up to be more than audience; the work asks us to show up and labor for community in a way that energizes more than it entertains.
Lucky for us all, 125th and Freedom’s tribe will walk, sing, and strategize together again this Sunday, September 24th. See you there. Wear your walking shoes, and keep your soul open. #125thandFreedom. Onward.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/125th-freedom-a-choreopoetic-ritual-performance-tickets-37105955913