Songwriter, storyteller, and 2022-24 Princeton Arts Fellow Kamara Thomas and her ensemble present a musical performance of Thomas’s multidisciplinary storytelling work Tularosa: An American Dreamtime on Tuesday, April 25, at 7:30 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, located on the Princeton campus. The event is free and open to the public, however advance tickets are required through University Ticketing. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
In collaboration with the Boulder, Colorado-based theater company Band of Toughs and with support from a MAPFund grant, Thomas is currently developing Tularosa: An American Dreamtime, a story-work based on her 2022 album of the same name, which explores the American psyche through the mythology of the American West. Both the album and story-work are based on the Tularosa region in New Mexico, where land was fought over for centuries by Apaches, Comanches, Mexican farmers, Texas ranchers, and eastern railroad capitalists, and where the first nuclear bomb was detonated. The collaborative and site-specific performance at Princeton weaves together music, theater, ritual, and archetypal visual elements in direct response to the Richardson Auditorium venue. This will be the first of two site-specific iterations of Tularosa on campus— the next installment is planned for early October in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex and will include research into Robert Oppenheimer’s time at Princeton.
Songwriter, storyteller and Princeton Arts Fellow Kamara Thomas. Photo credit: Derrick Beasley
Based in Durham, North Carolina, Thomas calls herself “a songspeller and mythology fanatic.” Her sprawling musical storyworks are collaborative and multi-faceted, erecting scaffolding for communal art-making that includes performance, ritual, masks, archival research, photography, and film, aimed at the re/invention of collective mythologies. Recent installments of her storywork Tularosa include performances at Santa Fe Art Institute and the Boulder Museum of History (2022); music/experimental dance video Last Ride to Las Cruces (2022); #9 – a multidisciplinary pandemic performance for nine social-distancers (2020); and Soapbox, a communal agitprop public-space takeover in downtown Durham that resulted in the video Good Luck America (2018). Thomas has been commissioned by Duke University, University of North Carolina, and Cassilhaus. She also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, an artist-driven media platform and production team rooted in the mission to amplify historically marginalized voices (BIPOC/LGBTQIA+) in American roots music.
The Arts Fellows program provides support for early-career artists who have demonstrated both extraordinary promise and a record of achievement in their fields with the opportunity to further their work while teaching within a liberal arts context. Funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the David E. Kelley ’79 Society of Fellows Fund, and the Maurice R. Greenberg Scholarship Fund, fellows are selected for a two-year residency to teach a course each semester or, in lieu of a course, to undertake an artistic assignment that deeply engages undergraduate students, such as directing a play, conducting a musical ensemble, or choreographing a dance piece. Fellows are expected to be active members of the University’s intellectual and artistic community while in residence, and in return, they are provided with the resources and spaces necessary for their work.
Last semester Thomas led a series of informal songwriting workshops for students. This coming fall, she will teach an interdisciplinary music and theater course entitled “Multidisciplinary Musical Storytelling — Tularosa: An American Dreamtime,” which will use her story-work as a springboard to help students explore musical storytelling through a multidisciplinary lens and ultimately create their own unique storytelling projects.
The Tularosa performance features an ensemble of professional collaborators including Gabe Anderson, Sarah Dawson, Gabby Hooper, Saman Khoujinian, Joe MacPhail, Janet Mylott, Luis Rodriguez, Molly Sarlé, Robert Sledge and Anissa Weinraub, along with Princeton undergraduate student Jimmy Waltman ’23.
Visit the Lewis Center website for more information on this event, Princeton Arts Fellowships, or any of the more than 100 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free.
