MEMORY FLEET: A RETURN TO MATR
Memory Fleet is a continually expanding, episodic, migrating performance that builds an alternative archive for the preservation of shared memories and stories that center the work/rest & past/future of the Black people who have mothered and mentored Jasmine Hearn’s artistic trajectory as an organizer, storyteller, dancer, and performer. Memory Fleet encompasses a series of performances, a shared embodied practice, a living archive, and a body of original sound, text, and recipes—all celebrating the stories, dances, and gestures passed on through Black intergenerational lineages.
LOCATION
Houston Met Dance
4916 Main St
Houston, TX 77002
The project premiered in Houston with DiverseWorks. Hearn is developing a memory-keeping practice that will tour Pittsburgh, PA, and New York, NY as a way to archive the living memories of their dance mothers within their communities.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jasmine Hearn – they/them was born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX. They studied dance with a multitude of teachers including their sister, cousins, aunties, teachers, and friends at family events, church, and at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center Jasmine is an internationally touring interdisciplinary artist, director, choreographer, organizer, doula, performer, director, and a Rome Prize Fellow with Athena Kokoronis at the American Academy in Rome. Jasmine has also been awarded three Bessie Awards for Outstanding Performance (2017) with skeleton architecture, Outstanding Performance (2021), and Outstanding Production (2021) with the cast and crew of The Motherboard Suite.
Jasmine has creatively collaborated with artists Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Maria Bauman, Lovie Olivia, Ayanah Moor, Staycee Pearl, Holly Bass, Li Harris, and companies, Urban Bush Women, David Dorfman Dance, and Helen Simoneau Danse, which have produced solo and collective dance choreography for performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Ford Foundation, Danspace Project, BAAD!, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and other internationally acclaimed art spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Their commitment to performance is an expansive practice that includes dance, embodied sound, garment design, painting, and the archiving of matrilineal memory. Jasmine gives gratitude to Spirit, their mothers, and all the mothering Black people, who have supported their dreaming dancing moving remembering body.
Website: https://www.jasminehearn.com
Instagram: @jasminehearncollaborates
Instagram: @memory_fleet
SUPPORT
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is presented and produced by DiverseWorks in collaboration with Houston Met Dance.
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr’s presentation in Houston is supported in part by an Arts Projects grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Hollyfield Foundation, and the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts.
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is a 2022 Creative Capital and 2022 National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks in partnership with Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens, NY, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, New York Live Arts, New York, New York. Memory Fleet was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
PRESS
Ellis Orts, Neil, “Memory, Mothers, and Home” OutSmart Magazine (March 2024).
Wozny, Nancy, “Many Bodies in One: The Deep Practice of Jasmine Hearn,” Dance Magazine (Jan 2022).
