What Does PURPLE Sound Like?
A multimedia art installation with excerpt performances from PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells
By Sydnie L. Mosley Dances

What Does PURPLE Sound Like? is a visual and performance art installation that celebrates older adults, women, and Black communities throughout central Pennsylvania. The experience features local community participants in performance alongside SLMDances artists in excerpts from the dance company’s work PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells.

In the creation of the work, SLMDances looked to Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple for inspiration: Textile arts are tools of transformation and liberation. Bolstered by two years of community engagements and re-imagined for the Eisenhower Auditorium stage, What Does PURPLE Sound Like? invites the audience to an on-stage gallery installation featuring quilts by Shani Peters and on loan by Dr. Kim F. Hall; short films by Orion Gordon and Veleda Roehl of RAH Productions; with photographs and additional video footage by Center for the Performing Arts multimedia specialist Michael W. Fleck.

Excerpt performances from PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells invites participants reacting to instructions to an invitation to be comfortable in their seat, into a breathing ritual, to exchange roles and physical places between performers and witnesses, and to participate in performance as ceremony.

“The stage is our altar. Building a visual work of sacred objects, we break convention by having conversation in real time as an offering and an imagining about what PURPLE is and does,” Mosley says. “It enacts a world where Black communities and womxn live just and self-determined lives, where we all feel permission to tell our stories, healing through breath and community care, and joy.”