A continuation of Each Body Is a Miracle (Haiti Cultural Exchange, 2017) and Each Body Is (Still) a Miracle (No Longer Empty, 2019), Each Body Remains a Miracle is a play in retreat and an exploration of health and wellness Brooklyn. Each Body Remains a Miracle reflects on building community in the frame of the Old Stone House’s exhibition, Brooklyn Utopias: 2020. The project is filtered through the lens of Bernarda’s Daughters, a new play-in-progress that tells the story of five sisters living in the heat of mourning their father, their neighborhood, and what they thought they knew about their lives. Set in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Bernarda’s Daughters is a reflection on a rapidly changing neighborhood through the voices and bodies of people it seems there is no longer room for.
Life as it has been known is undergoing seismic changes in the midst of COVID-19. The arts landscape is just one small area of this revolutionary shift. Each Body Remains a Miracle is a response to this shift as it reimagines the play development process to occur in real, lived time in the geography the script draws inspiration from. In Brooklyn Utopias, this play “in praxis and retreat” ponders what a livable future in Brooklyn looks like in the revealing light of a global pandemic and continual state violence. This imagining of a different kind of Brooklyn future occurs through two modes of practice: the installation of an essay called Florence Delva and a book-making public project called What Comes from the Garden. Both of these endeavors will inform the ongoing development of Bernarda’s Daughters, which asks: How do we care for our neighbors when the amenities of new construction seduce tenants into exceedingly more private life? How do we live when constantly changing environmental factors present difficult challenges? How do we keep alive what this world is so quick to kill?
