WAA^LA Opening Ceremonies, sponsored by DCA

Welcome to WAA^LA! We'll set the scene for the week ahead and welcome the community together.

Thanks to a partnership with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), the Opening will feature performances by three local artists, selected through DCA’s Leimert Park Cultural Hub (LPCH), whose mission is to provide a supportive framework for local performers:

Bernard Brown/bbmoves presents Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves, a performance project by choreographer, educator and embodied researcher Bernard Brown by, for, and about Black, Brown, and Queer artists who have created spaces that feed the music, dance, fashion, and creative heartbeat of underground Los Angeles. Brown spotlights a community of Black and Brown men, accompanied by a live DJ, Defacto X, in an uplifting dance performance that celebrates the Black Gay bar as a Queer haven. Taking its title–Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves–from the disco-era ballad by Black Queer music icon Sylvester and Marlon B. Ross’s text “Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness,” this work conjures a future where Queer Men of Color craft their own narratives as central to society. This work focuses on Black Gay bars and clubs—sites of leisure and pleasure—and gathering places for support and political action, especially at the onset of the gay liberation movement and the onslaught of HIV/AIDS, with Queer people of color dipping and kiki-ing through disco, R&B, techno, and house, highlighting the “lost generation” of souls whose gifts and talents continue to change our world. Sissies prompts us toward visioning and worldmaking that is inclusive of Black Queer voices.

NYALLAH presents The Concept of Returning Home, a live sonic performance fusing jazz, experimental music, neo-soul, R&B, UK garage, hip-hop, and African diasporic sounds. Through live instrumentation, layered vocals, and immersive video excerpts, the work honors Black thinkers and artists who have shaped NYALLAH’s creative lineage—including Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, and Marlon Riggs. Reimagining previously composed works with new textures and live arrangements, this performance explores themes of timelessness, transformation, and ancestral memory. The result is a reflective, genre-expansive experience rooted in Black cultural legacies.

Towne Street Theatre presents I Dream of Emmett Till by playwright David Lee Lindsey, part three of a four-part play chronicling the experiences of an African American family from 1860 and the end of slavery to present day America. It is based on the struggle to survive for one family across different generations and persevering. The play begins in the year 2010 with a writer reflecting on that fateful day in 1950 when a 14-year-old Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman and was then abducted by a gang of white men and brutally murdered. Did he whistle at her, or was it a mistaken event? What would compel a young black boy to whistle at a white woman in the deep south of 1950’s America? As the writer says in the play, “It makes no sense!” Many families of all races, ethnicities, and religions currently fear vigilante justice or state sanctioned violence. This piece uses the healing power of theatre and the shared human experience to inspire communities to explore histories that we do not want to see repeated, be inspired to help dismantle injustice, and encouraged to preserve familial and community ties that uplift and protect all of us. I Dream of Emmett Till is a story that has been told many times, but as Black stories and cultural histories are currently being rewritten or outright erased, TST believes that performing this play in culturally specific festivals, local communities, and schools is vital to keeping Emmett Till’s story, and truthful American history, alive.