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. 

In recognition of the Staten Island community, ISSUE will be offering free advanced tickets for Staten Island residents. For more information, please contact [email protected] for limited ticket access (with proof of residence) no later than July 15th.