Performances
Walking with My Ancestors: Cape Coast Castle (2019), the award-winning and nationally recognized performance piece, is about a mother’s search for guidance from the spirits of her ancestors in the dungeons for enslaved Africans.
The story takes the audience through a ritual journey that includes dance, music, and drama and leads to revelation, reconciliation, and rebirth. Walking with My Ancestors offers fresh perspectives on the experiences of the “forgotten” enslaved Africans and demonstrates how today’s racial and cultural problems connect with truths of our shared and painful pasts. The work is timely. It provides platforms for deepened conversations about identities, diversity and inclusion, immigration and migration, border crossings, citizenship, parenting, homeland and diaspora, and the “ghosts of slavery.” Ultimately, Walking with My Ancestors is a human story about triumph over adversity, hope, resilience, emotional justice, and survival.
Immersive ethnographic research and practice-led research to performance at Cape Coast Castle.
Walking with My Ancestors: Elmina Castle
Performance, February 18, 2022
Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum, KoJo Aduonum, MaAdwoa Aduonum, Maximillian Beck, Jamillah Gilbert, Mark Gilbert, Sr., Jerry James
In November the New Route Theater premiered School of Music Professor Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum’s new play, Walking with My Ancestors. The production reconstructed the lived experiences of African women who were enslaved at Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana for several months at a time, before being loaded onto ships and transported to the Americas.
Walking with My Ancestors: Elmina Castle
performance premiere November, 2015
