Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens: “Words and Music”

Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens: “Words and Music: Performance in Process”
with Hermitage Fellows Ni’Ja Whitson and Thea Lobo
Friday, August 27th at 6:30pm
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Downtown Sarasota

Two unique and extraordinary performing artists, Ni’Ja Whitson and Thea Lobo, will share their words, voices, and music in a memorable summer evening at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Register here.

Hermitage Fellow, Creative Capital and Bessie Award Winner, gender nonconforming/astral transmogrifier, interdisciplinary artist and writer, Ni’Ja Whitson, has been referred to as “majestic” and “magnetic” by The New York Times and is recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. Ni’Ja is a 2018 MAP Fund recipient, featured choreographer of the 2018 CCA Biennial, and 2018-2020 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow. Other recent awards include a US Artists Fellowship nominee, Shortlist for the Tarpaulin Book Award (The Unarrival Experiments), Camargo/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, Dance in Process (DiP) Residency, Hedgebrook Fellowship, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, among dozens of other residencies and awards across disciplines. Whitson has been a student and practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms for two decades, creating work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and interdisciplinary performance. They engage a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, through a critical intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality. Working internationally, creative efforts include collaborations and performance in theater, dance, music, and visual art with artists including Douglas Ewart, Cynthia Oliver, Jaamil Kosoko, Sharon Bridgforth, Dianne McIntyre, Charlotte Brathwaite, La Pocha Nostra, Daniel Alexander Jones, Baba Israel, Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis.  A noted innovating practitioner of the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic and accomplished improviser Whitson performs nationally with renowned musicians and enjoys a close collaborative partnership with Douglas Ewart of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.  Ensembles have included Oliver Lake, JD Parran, Matt Shipp, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Mankwe Ndosi, Tatsu Aoki, and Joseph Jarmon. Whitson’s award-winning practice extends to choreography, directing, and dramaturgy in conventional and experimental theatre with artists such as Dianne McIntyre, Regina Taylor, Susan Watson-Turner, Emily Mendelsohn, Charlotte Brathwaite, Daniel Alexander Jone, and he collaborative team Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis. Recent Commissions and residencies include opening artist of the 2018 Cornell Center for the Arts Biennial, EMPAC, Danspace at St. Marks Church, LaMaMa Moves! Festival, Vision Festival, PRELUDE Festival, and Harlem Stage. Whitson’s evening-length work, A Meditation on Tongues, premiered to sold out New York audiences at the American Realness festival, received a Critic’s Pick from the New York Times and toured nationally.  Whitson’s 2019 premiere Oba Qween Baba King Baba received three Bessie nominations including Outstanding Production, Outstanding Design (of which Ni’Ja was co-costume designer) and Outstanding Performance (Kirsten Davis).

Other recognitions and awards include several New York Times, Time Out New York and Chicago Critic’s Picks, Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Outstanding Ensemble Award, Downtown Urban Theatre Festival Audience Award, Vermont Studio Center Writing Residency, LinkUp Inaugural Artist in Residence, Chicago DanceBridge Residency, John G. Curtis Jr. Prize, Archibald Motley Grant, 3Arts Visual Artist Award Nomination, and a MFA Fellowship Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Ni’Ja Whitson engages in an active bi-coastal practice as an Assistant Professor at University of California Riverside, and received a second MFA at Goddard College in creative writing as the recipient of an Engaged Artist Award.

Hailed as “excellent,” “impeccable,” “limpidly beautiful,” “impressive,” “stunning,” and “Boston’s best,” Hermitage Fellow and Grammy-nominated mezzo-soprano Thea Lobo‘s 2020-21 season has included performances with The Spectrum Singers, Great Music in a Great Space Series, USF New Music Festival, The Sarasota-Manatee Bach Festival, EnsembleNewSRQ, Emmanuel Music, and others. Ms. Lobo has previously appeared under conductors Gunther Schuller, Harry Christophers, Stephen Stubbs, Joshua Rifkin, and Andris Nelsons, and has been featured by the Firebird Ensemble, Boston Baroque, Naples Philharmonic, Boston Early Music Festival, Artist Series of Sarasota, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Europäisches Musikfest Stuttgart. Her dedication to new music, art song, and early music has seen her featured on True Concord’s 2016 Grammy winning recording of Stephen Paulus’s ‘Prayers & Remembrances,’ invited to the Carmel Bach Festival as an Adams Fellow, a prizewinner at the Bach Vocal Competition for American Singers, a grant recipient of the Julian Autrey Song Foundation, a winner of the St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award, premiere-recording new roles with Guerilla Opera, and performing as a soloist under the direction of composers Steve Reich, Vinko Globokar, Fred Lerdahl, Christian Wolff, and Louis Andriessen. A graduate of New England Conservatory and Boston University, she now serves as artistic and executive director of the initiative Indictus Project, which promotes the classical music of women, minorities, and other marginalized composers throughout history.