The Cut Loose: A Harlem Brownstone Ritual
September 18 @ 6:30 pm
$16.90
Join us for a work-in-process concert of excerpts from The Cut Loose: A Harlem Brownstone Ritual, followed by a conversation with the audience.
The Cut Loose will premiere next year as an immersive experience in a Harlem brownstone transformed into a living archive of Black cultural memory. This performance at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center offers an early look, as award-winning choreographer and director Jeffrey Page and his creative team present a selection of songs from the show.
The Cut Loose centers on Mimi and her profound love for Kidd Bunky, a man who is brilliant, charismatic, full of promise, and notoriously unfaithful. When Mimi realizes love has not made him hers, she turns to Marie Laveau, the legendary 19th-century New Orleans spiritual leader who was both a lifelong Roman Catholic and the city’s most renowned Voudou priestess.
What first appears to be a house gathering reveals itself as a New Orleans jazz funeral. It is not only a farewell to Kidd Bunky, but also a collective act of release, honoring the people, traditions, and moments that shape us even as they move beyond our grasp.
Inspired by Arthur Hall’s groundbreaking 1977 production Fat Tuesday & All That Jazz, this new work explores Black Mardi Gras, Black Masking traditions, New Orleans ritual life, jazz, and cultural survival. Rather than reconstructing Hall’s original work, The Cut Loose enters into dialogue with it, asking how these traditions evolved as they traveled across generations and geographies.
Blending theater, music, ritual, and communal experience, The Cut Loose is a celebration of resilience, remembrance, and transformation. It is an invitation to honor what we love by learning how to let it move.
This event will be followed by a reception in the DR Center Gallery, now showing Woven Wonders: Kykuit’s Picasso Tapestries.
Guests may arrive 45 minutes prior to the event start time to enjoy the new Sculpture Walk outside the DR Center. Please note that events will begin promptly at their scheduled start time. Latecomers will be seated at the discretion of staff.
Presented in partnership with the RBF Culpeper Arts & Culture program and En Garde Arts.
All sales final; no refunds.
