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Grace Potter is launching Grand Point Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the arts in Vermont. Grand Point Foundation seeks to inspire a culturevation for all Vermonters, connecting our communities in celebration of art and culture.
Bread & Roses Collaborative will partner with Song Confessional and Boom! Lawyered will partner with local and national abortion funds to collect abortion stories. Our emphasis will be on those individuals who have sought reproductive healthcare, along with people whose partners have had abortions, and those who work in the reproductive justice movement. We will interview and include local reproductive justice advocates and musicians in every location. Boom! Lawyered will complete a deep dive into how we got here, alongside long-form journalism that tells the story of abortion in America today. Song Confessional will produce an album with songwriters and artists from across the country, turning abortion stories collected into songs that support abortion funds in perpetuity. In 2025, we will complete a tour, hosting public and private salons in select cities, screening a short film, and hosting benefit concerts to support and uplift local abortion funds. An educational web series, storytelling training, advocacy toolkit, and impact campaign will accompany the project, collecting donations for abortion funds. Sale of the short film will benefit abortion funds nationwide.
The Blue Hour is an evening length song cycle commissioned by Boston-based string orchestra A Far Cry, and born of a unique collaboration between five composers: Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Set to excerpts from 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize winner Carolyn Forché’s epic abecedarian poem, “On Earth,” the music follows one woman’s journey through the liminal space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images.
Hungry River is a performance collaboration between songwriter and community historian Tift Merritt, illuminating the prophetic importance of the people in an unexplored box of patient photographs from a 1920s-era segregated North Carolina asylum, and a portrait of how the vulnerable carry the soul of a society. A collection of songs and monologues, a ceremony, a meditation, a community history - this creative intervention sings loudly: who are these people, and what must we learn from them?
The Way Forth, a folk opera and film by composer Rachel Grimes, is an experiential, non-linear journey following generations of Kentucky women’s voices from 1775 to today. Inspired by a treasure-trove of family documents, photos, and letters, Grimes began in 2016 to research some of the more vexing questions that came to the surface about these people, places, and events, and discovered alongside a counter-narrative of the exploitation of people and resources that marks Kentucky’s history, and, ultimately, the expansion of America.
Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever is a multidisciplinary performance created by Haitian-American singer-songwriter Leyla McCalla in collaboration with Director Kiyoko McCrae. Breaking The Thermometer explores the legacy of Radio Haiti-Inter, Haiti’s first independent radio station to broadcast news in Haitian Creole—the voice of the people—until the assassination of the station’s founder, Jean Dominque.
The Rosetta Circle is a creative response to Rosetta Reitz’ musical archive of care -- a performance collective of care. We explore how to continue the spirit of Rosetta's work and honor the unsung foremothers of jazz with collaboration and multiple viewpoints. The structure and the practice of the circle is designed to speak back to the music business's harmful practices like racism, sexism, unfair wages and leaving women out of the story. Our work pursues music's ability to amplify public history and make change. This project is a pilot for an ongoing social justice-minded performance collective. A first Rosetta Circle in-progress performance pilot this April features Adia Victoria, Rissi Palmer, Shirlette Ammons, Shana Tucker and Tift Merritt and begins our work exploring how the women of Rosetta Records speak to today. Unmanageable is thrilled to produce the first Rosetta Circle in tandem with Duke Performances and Tift Merritt.