Keeper of Sadness
Presenting at Union Station
August 1–2, 2026
Keeper of Sadness is an immersive performance and living archive centering the experiences of Black women, queer & gender-nonconforming individuals.
The work brings together movement, sound, and storytelling to explore grief as something ancestral, collective, and deeply personal. It reflects on the intergenerational impacts of trauma, societal narratives, and historical erasure while holding space for memory, resilience, and reclamation.
Keeper of Sadness invites audiences into a shared encounter with grief. Not as something to resolve, but as something to witness, carry, transmute and understand on a deeper level.
STATEMENT
Photo/Michele Dooley
Keeper of Sadness offers an intimate exploration of the ways grief is carried, remembered, and passed on across generations.
Through performance and environment, the work considers how Black life is shaped by forms of loss that are both visible and unseen. It holds space for experiences that are often carried but rarely named, and asks what it means to witness them collectively.
The work draws attention to the ways memory, erasure, and survival are intertwined, using storytelling as a site of remembrance and resistance.
Photo/Lisa Swimmer
THE EXPERIENCE
This installation unfolds over two evenings at Union Station in Seattle. Audiences will move through a space shaped by performance, sound, and projection-based media, encountering the work in a way that is both intimate and collective. Visual elements are integrated into the environment, extending movement and narrative beyond the body and into the space itself. Light, image, and sound operate alongside the performers, creating a layered experience that is both physical and atmospheric.
Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, Keeper of Sadness invites audiences into a dynamic, immersive unfolding. Viewers are not positioned outside the work, but within it—witnessing and engaging with the emotional and spatial presence of the piece.
Featured Collaborators
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Jade Solomon-Curtis
Director & Choreographer
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Nile Ruff
Performance Arist
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Michele Dooley
Performance Artist
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Anatola Araba
Projection Media Designer
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Dani Tirrell
Community Liason
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Cristina Orbe
Workshop Facilitator
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Everett Saunders
Sound Composer
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Arif Gursel
Cinematographer
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Booking + Management
Gail Boyd Artist Management & Siegel Artist Management
Presented by Solo Magic, a PACE 501c3 program
Keeper of Sadness is part of Solo Magic, an experimental arts platform supporting multi-disciplinary artistic practice and new forms of cultural storytelling. Within this context, the work exists as both performance and archive, evolving through each presentation and the communities it engages.
Save the Date
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August 1–2, 2026