Yeye 2022

Yeye pays homage to Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea and motherhood. Originally created for the camera and now adapted for the stage, the piece explores the afterlife of slavery and its ongoing reverberations. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, choreographer and performer Lois Alexander weaves personal narrative with historical research on representations of Black motherhood in religion and mythology. Referencing figures like the Black Madonna, Yeyeexamines processes of syncretization and their implications. Through the use of textiles, sound, and gesture, the work evokes a layered physicality that traces memory, loss, and resistance. It asks what temporalities and materialities shape a racialized body, and how performance can serve as a space for refusal, reckoning, and repair.