7NMS | PROPHET: THE ORDER OF THE LYRYCIST
Performance | Movement & Storytelling workshops | Lec Dem
7NMS is the public emergence of Choreographer MARJANI FORTÉ-SAUNDERS and Composer EVERETT SAUNDERS’ work as a collaborative team, radically engaging art as a medium of elevation, healing, and futurity. With 7 award winning projects in 10 years, 7NMS tote a revolutionary commitment to the Black radical imagination.
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PROPHET is an archival, research, & multi-genre storytelling project on the life-journey of a Lyricist. Manifesting as a Performance Work, an Ethnographic Memoir, an Experimental Film, and Album, Prophet: The Order of Lyricism, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists.
Tracing the evolution of ‘Mental’, from Emcee to Lyricist, 7NMS invites audiences to enter a world of mind power, bravery, self-determination, and triumph- facets of the artist's quest for self realization. Using text, sound, film, and performance PROPHET makes its own imaginative, and embodied contribution to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression.
PROPHET is an awardee of the 2020 MAP Fund and 2020 New Music USA Award.
"When Saunders speaks, it is with the inherited legacies of a collective past; he has both the commanding voice of a preacher at his pulpit and the natural, rhythmic cadence of a trained emcee."
The Brooklyn Rail
About 7NMS
7NMS is the public emergence of Choreographer MARJANI FORTÉ-SAUNDERS
and Composer EVERETT SAUNDERS’ work as a collaborative team, radically
engaging art as a medium of elevation, healing, and futurity. With 7 awardwinning
projects in 10 years, 7NMS tote a revolutionary commitment to the
Black radical imagination.
Marjani is a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship awardee, a 3x
Bessie Award-winner, and an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill, Dance USA
and UBW Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowships.
Everett is the thought partner behind the award-winning 7NMS production
Memoirs of a… Unicorn, and is a New Music USA Awardee twice over. His
recent work can be found on Jaamil Kosoko’s Chameleon, Mayfield Brooks’
Whale Fall, and Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories.
While incubating PROPHET through their Fall ‘20 and Winter ‘21 Satellite
Residencies, they worked in close collaboration with co-visionaries d. Sabela
grimes (movement composer and sound archivist), Meena Murugesan (filmmaker
& media designer), and Marc Winston (photographer), producing PROPHET’s
latest filmic iteration, commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow.
