The Brooklyn-based ‘soul-sister conspiracy of arts and activism’ Alixa and Naima will bring their new multi-media performance, Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages in Water, to Cleveland September 4, as part of a 50-city tour.

Through a tapestry of spoken-word poetry, video projection, dance, shadow art, and a sound collage of personal testimonies, Hurricane Season connects issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the “unnatural disasters” disenfranchised communities are experiencing nationwide and worldwide on a daily basis. Hurricane Season tackles global warming, environmental injustice, policing, prisons, militarization, corporate domination, gentrification, and displacement as they manifest from one gulf to another, with a powerful tale of resistance, resilience, creativity and survival.

Hurricane Season will show at Pilgrim Congregational Church (2592 West 14th Street, in Tremont) on Thursday, September 4. Doors open at 6:30 PM and the performance will begin at 7:00 sharp.

With roots in Haiti and Colombia, Alixa and Naima have tracked footprints across the country and globe as the duo Climbing PoeTree, on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity. In five self-organized independent tours, Climbing PoeTree has pulled together over 500 crowds in more than 70 cities from Oakland to Atlanta, Johannesburg to Havana with artists such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Danny Glover, The Last Poets, and Dead Prez. The Hurricane Season tour begins in Philadelphia on the third anniversary of Katrina, and will travel city to city in a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil.

“As the concept for Hurricane Season has been growing,” says Adrienne Brown, Executive director of the Ruckus Society, “I have watched Alixa and Naima open themselves up to the darkest material in the world in order to find the slivers of hope and solution within, and now they are coming back to us with prophecy and hope, and we are all waiting, trusting that what they found will move us.”

Rhythmic and uplifting, revealing and deeply moving, Hurricane Season was crafted from the ground up, from the experiences of real people, seeking not to captivate audiences, but to liberate them. Every show will be followed by a “solutions-cipher”, where audience members participate in a dialog featuring local grassroots organizations, visionaries, and healers, to draw vital connections between shared struggles and common solutions in a critical moment in human history. Local grassroots groups City Fresh, Peace in the Hood and Metro Youth Outreach will be featured in this forum, in an attempt to cross-pollinate creative strategies for self-determination and to turn the passion generated in the show into action manifested in the community.

“[Alixa and Naima are] two wise and beautiful souls spouting the truth in such a way that makes one cry and laugh and rage and hope all in a matter of hours,” audience member Michelle Pizzuli accounts. “Climbing PoeTree creates, something so raw, and so inspiring. I hope their message will be heard by all.”

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