GO FORTH 2024 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Live electronics


Design by Christopher Myers
Sound by Rucyl Mills
Light by Jeanette Yew
Produced by Kiara Benn
Stage Management by Lenyn Hernandez Marcia 
Performed by Helga Davis, Okwui Okpokwasili, Kaneza Schaal, Kiara Benn
Additional Performers: April Matthis (on film), Rucyl Mills

GO FORTH (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a translation into performance of six chapters from Going Forth By Day, a canon of Egyptian funerary texts, commonly known in the West as the Egyptian Book of The Dead. Originally intended to provide the deceased with a blueprint to the afterlife, Schaal excavates the spells and incantations as a performance score. GO FORTH proposes burial not as erasure but as offering restitution, creating space for the presence of the absent, the imagined, and the longed for.

Originally situated in the context of her own father’s death, the ritualized grieving practices of his burial, and the intimacy between black people and death globally, Schaal now places the work inside the web of thought and labor that flooded between Black people internationally in the mid 20th century, a moment when looking inward and outward at death and imperialism mobilized powerful alliances from Harlem to Cuba, Ethiopia, Senegal, Vietnam, Haiti, and Rwanda.

GO FORTH was developed in collaboration with performers Cornell Alston, Justin Hicks, April Matthis (on film), William Nadylam, Paul Pryce, Greig Sargeant, David Thomson, Ashely Vellano, Cheyanne Williams, and Courtney Williams.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 22, 2024






previous | next