“Art as Commerce is the Power to our Queer of Color Arts Legacy” Sheree L. Ross

Love Gratitude Blessings Joy and Appreciation to Sheree L. Ross
Consciousness Patron of the Arts

Sheree has supported my Consciousness/Spiritual Growth and Development for the past year/supporting the development of The love conjure/blues Text Installation and now my just-Being born project: delta dandi…

delta dandi explores the life of a Blues woman musician traveling with a Jazz band in the 1940’s at the height of the birth of bebop. delta dandi is a performance/novel that renders a polyrhythmic text based in oral histories. This Work will live as a book and as a cutting-edge theatre piece made of: text; documentary footage; live music; some fly singers; still images; and dramatization. The Work is an honoring of Black women musicians, Black history, and Black art forms, thereby the giving commentary on the American experience.

I will present the Work in-progress on 11/30/07 for The Center for African and African American Studies, U.T. Austin .

This work is very personal for me. It is an opportunity for me to take experiences gained from previous blues stories (the bull-jean stories), performance/novel & film installation (love conjure/blues) to a new level of exploration. This is an opportunity for me to leave a record of women like me/like my mother/her mother/us…

I am from the blues.Hard times remembered recounted like mantras/least we forget. Chants about survival and daddies taken in the night. Moans in the subtext of dreams.With chicken frying, music loud, finger popping and laughterI learned how to tell stories from my family.See Jazz is a blood memory. Something deep in the bones.A charge. A responsibility. A gift. Like those stories.Long before the mentors, the theatre, the words formedthere was my mother’s laughterand her mother’sand her’s.Sharon Bridgforth

THANK YOU SHEREE!! May your Wisdom and Generousity come back to you a hundred fold with Grace…