What’s A City For?
Latoya Lovely dances at The Soul Restoration Project. Photo by Shawnte Sims courtesy of Vanport Mosaic.
“A city is always being built in the image of the people building it.”
That is a line from Anis Mojgani's libretto to my chamber opera Sanctuaries, which, after a sixteen-month COVID delay, will have its premiere in early September. You can get tickets here, but that’s a different TEDTalk.
A lot of energy at the moment is going into “bringing Portland back.” Some folks are working to heal and restore, others to re-imagine and rebuild our city into the vibrant place that it was for many — but not all — back before the pandemic. When we say we want a vibrant city, what we often mean is that we want a place defined by artistic creativity, a place of startling beauty, full of joyous, hopeful expression. So it makes sense that we engage our artists to do the things that capture our imagination in those ways.
Darrell Grant with Latoya Lovely. Photo by Shawnte Sims courtesy of Vanport Mosaic.
The Soul Restoration Project arose out of my interest in exploring the ways that art can activate and renew our civic space. It provides opportunities for myself and fellow artists to weave together our practices of music, movement, visual art, and spoken word into daily rituals of collective intention that embody welcome, gratitude, reflection, and celebration.
I'm grateful to Prosper Portland, The City Repair Project, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland City Arts Program’s “Community Healing Arts Initiative,” and Piano. Push. Play. for providing the impetus and the resources to engage the public using artistic resources and creativity. Since launching The Soul Restoration Project in the North Park Blocks in mid-July as part of the Vanport Mosaic Festival, this opportunity to use the city as a laboratory has been inspiring, revealing, powerful, and challenging. To activate a space is to shine a light on the life that fills and surrounds it, but also to acknowledge the sometimes harsh realities that light reveals.
I'm also proud to engage in this labor in collaboration and solidarity with the amazing artists that over generations have made Portland the city it is. They bring us together, remind us of hope, and fuel our senses of imagination and belief when we are faced with the seemingly impossible — as we are right now. In good times they design our buildings; bring the concert halls, parks, and public spaces alive with music; tell our stories; and mark our triumphs and our tragedies. In the past year and a half, they have turned fences into galleries, porches and driveways into concert venues, streets into festival sites, vacant storefronts into learning opportunities. As artists, we are also called on to use our work to make scary places inviting and to make challenging spaces "safe." It is a powerful gesture and at the same time a big ask.
I don't have the answers yet, but I feel in my gut that we are embedded in the work of generating conversations — thousands of them — and keeping those conversations going through hardship, misunderstanding, disagreement, accountings of trauma and disappointment until new possibilities are revealed. Music, dance, spoken word, visual art, poetry — they are made for this work. And so for me, the ultimate goal of The Soul Restoration Project is to engage people in conversations with place, and the moment, and offer occasions for us to encounter each other as we figure out how to rewrite the story of what this city is. And hopefully, to imagine a story that has equity in it, and opens the door of invitation to those who historically have not been given equal opportunity here.
Today I'm feeling optimistic about that possibility. I feel like if we make a just city, people will protect it. If we make a beautiful city, people will treasure it. Make a welcoming city, and people will return to it. Make a generous city, and people will share it. And somewhere along this path, we will approach the city that we imagine is possible.
— Darrell