An audiovisual collage of an improvisational composition in process, structure, and crafting, ReBirthing Womb Waters: An Improvisational Jazz Ritual for Afro-Descendants creates, recreates, and reclaims the narrative of the mysterious ecstasy waters of the feminine body that only appear within the sensuous and intimate.

As Audrey Lorde links the erotic with notions of sprit and activism, ReBirthing centers the sacred moments of retreat to the power of the inner-sensing self, as moments of healing, providence, and preparation for activating agency through resistance. This work reimagines our Afro-Indigenous technology futures as praxis for embodying identity while navigating landscapes of modernity and pop culture. Incorporating myth making, auto-ethnography, rhythmic entrainment science, Taoist theory, originally sourced sound material, along with improvisational movement and song, this digital sound and performance installation is a call and response, a space to engage with the work from the interior as sustenance. It is an invitation to participate in exploring personal understandings of the liberation of the feminine waters of ecstasy and the lessons of the sensuous waters as they surface and circulate in the contemporary, through the world building of the knowledge systems that rooted our ancestors through their travels.

Jennifer Ligaya, is a sound and performance composer and healer born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art (Gallery 37), vocal performance (Hard Rock Cafe), dance (Field Museum with Tamboula Ethnic Dance Company), and theater (Circa-Pintig Theater Company). Her compositions are constructed to elevate key questions and highlight critical conversations around race and cultural identity, indigeneity and decolonization, activism, and healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices.

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This work was commissioned by BDAC’s Jupiter Performance Studio black/water is a project of BDAC’s Jupiter Performance Studio. http://www.bettysdaughterarts.com