Earlier today I attended the 42nd annual In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre's Mayday parade in Minneapolis.
This year's Mayday theme was "Radical Returnings," and was all about "turning towards each other rather than away from each other, repairing our relationships and the earth, finding redemption and freedom in tune with the turning of the earth and the return of spring."
The two images I share today were part of the parade story entitled "Reparations on Our Soul." Lead artists of this section were Angie Courchaine, Jordan Hamilton, Junauda Petrus, Dee Henry Williams and Amm-Ra Seka. About this parade section the Mayday Celebration program says the following.
Our ancestors were never slaves. Even though they were stuffed in the bottom of boats with pregnant bellies and terrified hearts in awe of evil that would shackle soulful humanity. Some of them jumped off the boat and whisper still from the bottom of the Atlantic. So don't act like you forget. Blackness is our wild and resilient magic. It is time to pay back the debt to our souls.
Sweet ancestral resiliency is our magic. And Wild Seed is our new possibility. Black soul shapeshifts and we alchemized into Prince, Malcolm X and Collard greens, James Baldwin, Basquiat and Angela Davis, Rock and Roll and Toni Morrison, Candied yams and Hip Hop, Mae Jemison and Serena Williams, agricultural advancements, Paul Robeson, Alice Walker, James Brown and Nina Simone and the Nay Nay, Phoenetic Ones and Bro Suns and infiniteness.
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• "And Still We Rise!" – Mayday 2015 (Part I)
• "And Still We Rise!" – MayDay 2015 (Part II)
• Mystics of Wonder, Agents of Change (Mayday 2014 – Part 1)
• "The Spiritual Dialectic of WONDER?!" (Mayday 2014 – Part 2)
• See the World! (Mayday 2013)
• The End of the World as We Know It (2012)
• "Uproar!" on the Streets of South Minneapolis: Part 1 (2010)
• "Uproar!" on the Streets of South Minneapolis: Part 2 (2010)
• Getting Started: Mayday 2009 (Part 1)
• Celebrating Our Common Treasury: Mayday 2009 (Part 2)
• Mayday and a "New Bridge" (2008)
• The Time is Now! (2006)
Images: Michael J. Bayly.
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