Praise Music Sonogram

Julia Barbosa Landois’s Praise Music Sonogram is a live performance that combines spoken word, video, and experimental sound to tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders. Contrasting an unexpected experience in a European haven for healthcare seekers with the medical scarcity and the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., Barbosa Landois delivers a narrative that is both deeply personal and unexpectedly comedic.

The performance is accompanied by a storytelling and knowledge-sharing zine, Tia Sabiduria, that is informed by the DIY aesthetic of Barbosa Landois’ youth. Zines and the community of zine-makers served as essential resources for Barbosa Landois within her conservative upbringing. Praise Music Sonogram exists where storytelling, community medicine, and transnational healthcare persist as resistance to geographic borders and limits on bodily autonomy. In development as part of a 2023 NPN Creation Fund grant from August 2023-December 2024, the work will premiere at DiverseWorks before traveling to the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of El Paso and Links Hall, Chicago.

SUPPORT

Praise Music Sonogram is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks, The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and NPN. For more information: www.npnweb.org.

Praise Music Sonogram is supported in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation. Additional program and general operating support is from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, The Brown Foundation, Inc., Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, Houston Endowment, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and Teiger Foundation.