TO BREATHE IS TRIUMPH: Irreversible Entanglements

Saturday, July 20th at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room, in partnership with Brooklyn Arts Council and First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, presents TO BREATHE IS TRIUMPH. Commemorating 10 years since the murder of Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY, ISSUE participates in a series of community activations happening across NYC sparked by The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist to contend with an important question: what does it mean to support Black life through embodied ritual? To honor this memorial anniversary in the last of its summer season programs, ISSUE joins these collective healing rituals by welcoming liberation-oriented free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements and afrofuturistic vocalist and improviser, Shara Lunon to First Unitarian in Brooklyn Heights.

The Ritual of Breath was born as an act of creative resistance. Originally commissioned and produced by Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth in 2022, the opera arrives in New York this year for Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival. TO BREATHE IS TRIUMPH is named after the final healing ritual tied to the themes and seven movements of the opera. These rituals are intended as offerings, adapted to each community where the work is shared. In Brooklyn, ISSUE invites Irreversible Entanglements and Lunon as members of our experimental music community to gather in civic partnership with The Ritual of Breath team “as co-conspirers—to breathe and keep breathing any way we can'' in an aim to address the ongoing loss of Black life at the hands of the State.

Both upholding and defying a tradition of improvisation, the Irreversible Entanglements (IE) quintet featuring came together in April of 2015 at "Musicians Against Police Brutality," a day of protest sound and discussion in Brooklyn. Uniquely exploring free jazz with voice–an uncommon approach in the modern day landscape of the genre–the band reflects a central tenet of the sound as it was founded: to be a vehicle for Black liberation. Amid performances across the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and more, the five players synthesize echoes from ancestral pasts to connect us to our bodies, find healing communion, and build new worlds. While several IE artists have presented work with ISSUE in the past, we are pleased to welcome the full quintet for this special occasion. 

In support of youth and families who have been victims of police brutality, please consider contributing to the ERIC Initiative Foundation (“Eliminating Racism Inequality Collectively”) as they continue to provide community services that address the underlying issues of systemic racism and criminal justice reform.

Irreversible Entanglements is a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality, that consists of poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. It is a community band playing deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment. Founded in 2015, all were artists and activists of varying degrees: Philadelphia-based Ayewa and Neuringer, and D.C.-based Stewart as veterans of the Mid-Atlantic noisehardcore-experimental scene, while Holmes and Navarro as recent New England Conservatory grads. Each of the studio albums that followed–2020's Who Sent You? and 2021's Open The Gates–developed this legend further. In 2023, IE signed to the fabled Impulse! Records, and released its most accomplished work to date, Protect Your Light, on September 8, 2023, primarily recorded at New Jersey's historic Van Gelder Studios. A guest appearance by Janice Lowe (piano/voice/flute) is also featured on the album, who appears in this performance.