WE WERE EVERYWHERE

We Were Everywhere is a first production of a new music theater work commissioned through the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Playwrights-in-Residence Fund at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

What memory does our clothing hold? What insight does it offer into the things we cannot see? This new music theater piece is a fantasia on history and material culture across multiple universes and phases of production, consumption and reuse.

 PRODUCTION TEAM

Director............................................................................................................... Shariffa Ali

Book and Lyrics …………………………………………………………………………………………………Joanna Ruth Evans & Shariffa Ali

Music and Lyrics ..............................................................................................Avi Amon

Music Director.....................................................................................................Anna Ebbesen

Orchestrations..............................................................…………….......………………....Anna Ebbesen and Avi Amon

Choreographer...................................................................………………………..........Jennifer Harrison Newman

Set Design ...........................................................................................................You-Shin Chen

Costume Design .................................................................................................Sarah Woodham

Lighting Design.........................................................................................………...Victoria Davidjohn

Sound Design & Engineering .............................................................................Kay Richardson

A NOTE FROM THE CREATIVE TEAM

It started with an image of mitumba; those giant bales of used clothing that travel in container ships from the West to be dumped in ports in East Africa and Southeast Asia. Somewhere along the way these disposed items enter into a new economic life: they become once more a raw material to be harvested and sold in bustling second-hand clothing markets which both sustain the livelihoods of merchants,

and suffocate local garment industries. We were fascinated by these mountains of disposed clothing, and their material and social histories.

And so in February we presented the students with a very loose draft of the script, and the prompt of different clothing “worlds” to research and explore together: mitumba piles, cotton plantations, factories, malls, suitcases and closets. It soon became clear how interwoven this material is with complex human histories: from cotton’s legacy in the US slave trade; to industrial era garment factories and their role in both the labor and women’s rights movements; to clothing’s spellbinding power as a tool for transformation and self-expression; to contemporary racial profiling; to the overlapping global migrancies of raw materials, disposed items, and vulnerable and exploited populations.

Originally we had imagined human characters threading this piece together. But the longer we worked, the more we realized that it was the clothing itself we wanted
to hear from: what does clothing feel, remember, experience, and know? If clothing could speak, what would it tell us? And so our cast entered into the impossible task of becoming clothing. We tried everything: Disney-style personifications, trance-
like embodiments, soundscapes, Haiku writing, and one particularly manic group improvisation where cotton buds swore revenge on human “flesh-puppets.” Then, one day, it just happened – the clothing spoke! And so the form and language of the show began to emerge.

This process was collaborative from the onset, combining Shariffa and Joanna’s background in Devised Theater in which they trained at the University of Cape Town, and Avi’s background in Musical Theater Writing at NYU. The students’ discoveries, poetry, curiosities, and quirks are woven throughout the fabric of We Were Everywhere. They have been incredible creative partners: patient, trusting, generous, and deeply thoughtful. Most importantly, they have courageously weathered the turbulent journey through the unknown that every new work must undertake.

We are grateful to the cast, to our creative and production teams, and to the Lewis Center for the Arts for providing the space and support to embark on this ambitious and unusual journey.

With love & “Trust!” Shariffa, Joanna, and Avi