Photos: VOICES: A SACRED SISTERSCAPE Premieres At The Apollo Theater

A new audio play, VOICES: a sacred sisterscape, premiered to sold-out crowds at the historic Apollo Theater on May 31, 2024 while honoring special guest Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror, "The West Wing"). VOICES will be available for streaming across all audio platforms beginning June 11, 2024. See photos from inside opening night. 

Grammy nominated poet aja monet ("When The Poems Do What They Do") was chosen by V (formerly Eve Ensler) writer of The Vagina Monologues, to spearhead this audio experience of stories written by, narrated by and centering Black women across the diaspora. 
 
Audience members were invited to freely sit in the reimagined Apollo Jonelle Procope Theater at The Victoria, with many of the usual theatre seats and stage replaced with patterned rugs, plush chairs, floor pillows and additional accessories. The space was also filled with books, cowrie shells and live plants, evoking a comfy living room. Attendees were given headphones and a silk eye mask to wear while listening to the audio piece, heard for the first time in the United States. 
 
Before introducing monet prior to the listening portion of the event, V expressed, “When we listen to people, when we hear people, they become known to us. And its much harder to hate and it’s much harder to hurt when we hold people inside of us in the knowing and the hearing of them”
 
monet shared, “This is a relatively new alternative and necessary approach, towards theatre, towards performances, towards our stories. We know we need to find new ways and get deeper into remembering what it is to be human, what it is to love, what it means to be transformed by each other, to learn from each other, to collaborate with each other, to strategize and work together. This is why listening became such a big part of this project. One of the most radical things we can do at this time is to listen, to compassionately listen and to be more involved in how we show up after we have listened.” 
 
Shenica Odom, Associate Director of the Apollo Theater Academy said about the sold out event “This is literally what we dreamt of. This is exactly how we hoped this space would be used.” 
 
VOICES is the newest artistic project and campaign out of V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against all women, gender expansive people, girls and the Earth, founded by V (formerly Eve Ensler) in response to the overwhelming number of stories of violence heard in response to The Vagina Monologues. For over 25 years, V-Day has unleashed vast grassroots, anti-violence work on college campuses and in communities – visionary work that has been survivor-led and focused, all the while revealing the power of art and activism to change culture and systems. When VOICES began in 2020, it was commissioned as a new play and campaign to move into the space The Vagina Monologues once occupied in the V-Day movement. The VOICES interdisciplinary performance art project and campaign is grounded in Black women’s stories of the African continent and diaspora brought to life.
 
LeahAnn “Lafemmebear” Mitchell, a Grammy nominated producer, has composed new music to accompany the audio play. VOICES is produced by Hollis Heath and V-Day.
 
The audio play will be distributed by Blackstone Publishing and made available digitally in all markets on June 11. V-Day will host an accompanying website featuring a solidarity toolkit as a guide for listeners as they experience VOICES.
 
For more information, please visit http://www.visforvoices.org/.

Photo Credit: Shannon Finney/Getty Images for V-DAY