NOW BOOKING
A Play By Joy Harjo
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light
From musician, poet, and playwright Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) comes a deeply compelling journey of struggle, displacement, self-discovery, and healing. Invoking spoken word, storytelling, and song, Harjo combines character-driven narrative with tales inspired by the traditions of her people—and takes a few turns blowing a mean jazz saxophone. An allegorical work of tremendous power, Wings demonstrates how theater and art can bring life full circle.
This unique and genre-bending one-woman play features Harjo’s original music and a score that has been pushed and molded by Grammy award–winning record producer Larry Mitchell, who recently produced Harjo’s Winding Through the Milky Way album.
Many of the songs are woven throughout the play. “Among Larry’s many gifts,” says Randy Reinholz, Artistic Director of Native Voices and Wings director, “is that he reaches into the story with the music and transports the action in amazing and unusual ways. I think the wide range of sounds he and Joy create together lifts Wings to the point of flight. “Wings is at the heart of theater—it is a heightened ceremony, a broad intersection of art forms, an intimate act that celebrates the beauty and investigates the inherent paradoxes of the human condition. Joy is fearless, bringing all of her many talents to bear in this tour-de-force performance,” continues Reinholz.
Wings was workshopped and performed as a staged reading at the Public Theater’s 2007 Native Theater Festival in New York. Since then, it has received additional workshops in San Diego, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Hawaii, and a staged reading with Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles.
—From Autry National Center Of The American West Press Release
Joy Harjo
(Mvskoke–Creek Nation) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her seven books of poetry include She Had Some Horses, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems.
Her poetry has garnered many awards including a
Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, a U.S. Artists Fellow Grant, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has released three award-winning CDs of original music and performances: Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century, Native Joy for Real, and She Had Some Horses. She received the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award for overall contributions in the arts from the American Indian Film Festival. She performs internationally solo and with her band, Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band (in which she sings and plays saxophone), and premiered a preview of her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, at the Public Theater in New York City in December 2007. She writes a column titled “Comings and Goings” for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Larry Mitchell
is a solo artist, sideman, songwriter, and music producer. As a solo artist he has released six guitar instrumental albums, range from mellow acoustic to scorching rock arrangements, which met with significant critical
acclaim. In 1999 he was named the much coveted Best Pop Jazz Artist at the San Diego Music Awards, and in 1986 and 1987 he won the New York City Limelight Guitar solo contest. Mitchell has been endorsed by Ibanez Guitars, D’Adarrio Strings, and DiMarzio Pickups since the mid-eighties. As producer, Mitchell has won many production and engineering awards in various categories such as adult contemporary, pop, R&B, and rap. Mitchell won a 2008 Grammy for coproducing the album Totemic Flute Chants: Johnny Whitehorse, released on Silver Wav Records, in the Native American category.
Wings Press Releases
REVIEWS (see below left)
PREVIOUS SHOWS
World Premier at the Autry National Center of
the American West
March 19-26, 2009
Native Voices at the Autry
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027
www.nativevoicesattheautry.org
http://nativevoices.blogspot.com
Public Theater/New York City
La Jolla Playhouse/La Jolla
Outpost Performance Space/Albuquerque,NM
Reviews
For Wings Joy Harjo teams with Grammy Award winning producer, Larry Mitchell to create the sound that helps to bring the entirety of being to the kitchen table.
Wing Art: From the image Pontiac Asks Raven #5
© 2009 Larry McNeil (Tlingit) www.larrymcneil.com
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/12/18576420.php
From — http://hawaii.broadwayworld.com/article/
Invoking spoken word, storytelling, music, and song, Harjo takes us on a wild theatrical ride where she tells it like it is with spirit and a mean jazz sax. An allegorical work of tremendous power, Wings demonstrates how theater and art can bring life full circle.
This unique and genre-bending one-woman play features Harjo's original music and a score that has been pushed and molded by Grammy award-winning record producer Larry Mitchell, who recently produced Harjo's Winding Through the Milky Way album. Many of the songs are woven throughout the play.
LA TIMES
From — Indybay.org
That Harjo portrays a character named Redbird, and that the backdrop for the performance is a beautiful, giant horse is not why I came away moved…it did make me feel delightfully welcome into the world she would unfold before us.
In her play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light Harjo takes her audience on a journey that begins and ends with healing. If the essence of ceremony can be put on stage, she has done it.
Harjo opens with a story of how we got lost; how we became separated from the beautiful world we were born into, a long time ago. She transitions smoothly into the personal story of Redbird Monawhee, a contemporary character facing challenges all too familiar to us today. — Corina Roberts
Joy Harjo’s “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light,” begins with a creation myth. Harjo tells us how trickster Rabbit creates a clay man, more out of whimsy than for any real purpose. But Rabbit’s prank backfires. The clay man’s insatiable hunger for game, for women, for all the riches of the Earth, soon throws the universe out of balance. It is only belatedly that Rabbit realizes his fatal mistake: He has fashioned the clay man with no ears.
The symbolism of that heedless, hungry clay man soon becomes apparent in Harjo’s delicately structured narrative. Males, of a particularly capricious and abusive ilk, routinely dominate the unfortunate women in their orbit. Harjo’s precociously sensitive heroine is the mixed-blood child of a Cherokee waitress and an alcoholic Creek father.
Read More: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/
We were thrilled to have Joy Harjo perform at the Tulsa City-County Library. Her blend of music and storytelling made for an exciting evening. Her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, was a perfect showcase for her talents as a poet, writer and musician. The powerful show was simultaneously personal and universal and her connection with the audience was palpable. —Cindy Hulsey, Tulsa City-County Library
