Passing Notes (2020)
virtual event created with Troy Anthony
From The Shed:
In PASSING NOTES, Troy Anthony and Jerome Ellis create a virtual sanctuary on Zoom and invite us to participate in a collaborative ritual loosely based on the seven stages of grief. Together, the two have composed original music and text, as if passing notes to each other at school, in order to make a space where we can honor the healers in our communities, address the racialized and gendered injustices exposed by the coronavirus, mourn those who have died during the COVID-19 crisis, and celebrate new habits, practices, and relationships that have been born during this time.
PASSING NOTES arose out of a conversation between the artists and The Shed’s program team shortly after Ellis’s grandfather passed on April 4, 2020. Like many families, Ellis’s relatives have not been able to hold a funeral due to restrictions on gatherings, and Anthony and Ellis began to ask themselves how they could intentionally use Zoom’s digital platform to bring grieving loved ones together. Inspired by sources including Assata Shakur’s poem “Affirmation,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler’s On Grief and Grieving, and the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” PASSING NOTES is intended to be experienced as a live, participatory event, making space to share grief in real time while separated from each other.
