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SUN SONGS: A Ritual in the Shape of Music…hear the feeling!
Finding our way back to the rhythm of love, guided by the flow of the natural world, and led by the presence of the infinite number of stars in the night sky, this musical grounds our relationship to time, guided by a cosmic kind of sentiment.
Based on a 22,000 year old indigenous African folktale, SUN SONGS (music & lyrics by kt madison, book by Deborah Cowell) is a meditative musical experience that explores how the rhythms of the natural world and each other help ground us when so much is burning. Seamlessly bringing a constellation of musicians (bass, guitar, cello & piano), [ancestors] into the narrative, along with a "narrator" to guide the story from the past through the present, we open ourselves to the possibilities of the future.
SUN SONGS’ early development took place at Hi-ARTS where kt was a CRITICAL BREAKS Artist in Residence.
About Katie Madison
Katie is a public school educated musical theatre composer from Traverse City, Michigan, based in the Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land known as Brooklyn. Katie is a University of Michigan Musical Theatre alum, and has a Master’s degree in Musical Theatre Writing and Composition from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Katie is a 2023, 2022 and 2021 Jonathan Larson Award finalist, and was seen in conversation with New York Times best selling author Ibi Zoboi debuting a digital commission produced with Kweli Journal and talking about Black Queer Love with Laylah Amatullah Barryn for NPR. Katie is a recipient of the New York City Artist Corps Grant, the Tisch School of the Arts Award, the Michigan Promise Award, the Michigan Tradition Award, and a New York Stage and a Film Founders Award finalist. Katie’s musical SUN SONGS was featured in Lincoln Center's inaugural “Summer for the City Festival” in July of 2022 after initial development at Hi-ARTS as part of their Critical Breaks residency. It was then presented at the historic Weeksville Heritage Center, followed by a full workshop at New York Stage and Film in 2023.
In the summer of 2024, SUN SONGS was featured at the only LGBTQIA2S+ museum in the world, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Katie is also a 2019 Sundance Theatre Lab and National Black Theatre Soul Producing finalist who has performed, produced, and has had work commissioned by the University of Michigan’s Musical Theatre Department, New York Stage and Film, Crossroads Theatre Company, American Opera Project, The Civilians, Milwaukee Skylight Theatre, The Tank, Judson Memorial Church, Rockwood Music Hall, and Dixon Place, 54 Below, Don't Tell Mama, The Stonewall Inn, The Dramatists Guild, Playwrights Horizons and with Broad Views on Broadway and Multicultural Womxn in Theatre. Katie brings the fundamentals of a sound practice as an investigation of the destabilization of aural and bodily oppression through a meditative state rooted in, built from, and designed to be in conversation with indigenous ancestral folk form and drum circle theory, grown in the tradition of Black feminism, Queer pioneers, accessibility advocates, social work practitioners, and community builders to teaching original musical compositions and New Work at The University of Michigan’s Musical Theatre Program and songwriting to elementary students in East Harlem.
Image credit: Blue; Graphic: Sarah Dahir @nawaal_illustrations