 good afternoon. How's everybody doing? My name is Jawole Willa-Joe Zoller, and I'm Founding Artistic Director of Urban Bushwomen. And we are thrilled to welcome you here this afternoon to witness the 2018 culminating performance of the Urban Bushwomen ASU Projecting All Voices Summer Leadership Institute. Our institute is a 10-day process, and it's a 10-day process being immersed in the values and organizing principles of Urban Bushwomen and People's Institute and the things that are part of our learning in the room. As a part of that, we have a process called asset mapping. And it is through the asset mapping process that we create everything that you're going to see here. So everything that you're going to see in the performance was created by the participants as a part of integrating and deepening the learning that has been going on, the exchange that has been going on. We know that when we put it in our bodies, in our songs, in our movements, in our hearts, that integrates our hearts and our minds, and the learning becomes deeper. So with that, again, I would like to welcome you. And we are so excited to be here. I'm going to take a moment, Susan, to come down. So give me a little light before you start to come down and come into the seat so I can enjoy it with you. Thank you. At the bottom of the ocean, Ancestor, we hear you. Through every raindrop and crashing of wave, as you spiral up into us, your turbulent truth we proclaim. I think, surely, not my first language, how can something that, at its essence, is pure and free, have a cause? It's given freely. It's received by all. It's felt innately. How can it have a cause? That was my reality. But then, like with most things, I realized my mom was right. There had been a cause, and I had been paying on it all along. And finally, my debt had come due. There had been a cause, you see, under all of the watch relies, the uninformed spectators, the unempathetic teachers, I had been paying the cost. I had been paying the cost through all of the, excuse me, what's that? I had been paying the cost through my visible spectatorship in common spaces. The here brown girl, wear these pink tights. The tuck your buttons. Under his eye. Through all of those things, I had been paying the cost. I could have continued to pay the physical cost, but the emotional and the mental costs were much too high. Ultimately, I decided to relinquish my first language, and I took on the language of my oppressor. Amid mass incarceration, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Treaty of La Messia, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the three-fifths decision, Dred Scott, Plessy versus Ferguson, 1954 Brown versus Board of Education, SB 1070, HB 2281, the Muslim ban. It's all here breathing into my brain. They lost me when they sold me. It's all here breathing into my body. I lost me when they moved. I lost me when... Spedish and a lesbian experience are things that I am not. I'm not my mother, and I have mixed feelings about my father, so I'm simultaneously pushing away and craving intimacy and affection. Trying to force myself into a language that was not designed for me, only to dignify my aesthetic. I feel it in my womb, living in my body, moving my body, and I'm starting to think, maybe I can dance, maybe I can be a house, to a life, to myself, to a new life, possibly, hopefully. First language. It's smart girls don't dance. Don't you want to be an engineer one day? I became overshadowed by the screams of whiteness and the screams of whiteness. I've been trying to convince me that whiteness is whiteness, and I'm swabbling in this land. In color and whiteness, in spirit and heart. Soy de tierra desde el pientes de colores y de acecas, me dices que no soy mexicana, pero yo... Liberation only makes us taste better. What kind of smartest, and you are absolutely ugly with that frizzy hair. What kind of black am I? White mother, two generations here from Portugal, black father, been here working generations, generations, generations. What kind of black am I? The kind never confused, clear as both my grandmother's stories, clear as a one drop. As a creator and a love. The same thing. God is my oath. Am I supposed to find out my grandmother's characteristics, her legacy through my daughter?