Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Blush will feature in The Good Peaches at the Mahaffey Theatre, St. Petersburg (FL), on 20 September. Choreographed by Alexander Jones and devised by Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Good Peaches is a multimedia collaboration between American Stage, The Florida Orchestra and projectALCHEMY Dance Company, blending music, theatre and dance, directed by Helen R. Murray.
The Good Peaches is a story of a girl’s desire for change and upheaval, against the backdrop of a huge storm – a fairy tale exploring climate change, intergenerational family dynamics, displacement, and migration, through a multi-disciplinary lens – an apt reflection of Witter-Johnson’s genre-crossing and boundary-breaking work, with her music bridging the RnB, soul, jazz, songwriting, and contemporary classical performance.
Chelsea Gallo conducts the Florida Orchestra in Witter-Johnson’s 10-minute work, scored for chamber orchestra. Commissioned by Chineke! Orchestra for the Edinburgh International Festival, it imagines the sound world experienced by a young Caribbean woman in the early part of the twentieth century attending her first dance; the work’s rhythms are inspired, as in many of her pieces, by Mento music – the early Jamaican folk tradition that blends African and European musical ideas.
Witter-Johnson’s previous projects for the dance stage include The Global Playground, created for the Manchester International Festival and Theatre Rites in 2021. Choreographed by Greogry Maqoma and directed by Sue Buckmaster, the piece sees a group of dancers come together to make a film, with things taking a surreal turn as the camera takes on a life of its own.
In 2018 she partnered with the award-winning Paris-based hip hop and contemporary dancer Mufasa for Crossroads, a collaboration between Breakin' Convention and Jazz re:freshed Sonic Orchestra at Sadler’s Wells. The genre-crossing work saw hip hop theatre meet big band jazz, with Witter-Johnson on vocals and cello. She also appeared herself as a cellist in Ceci N'est Pas Noire, a 2016 collaboration with Alesandra Seutin, a dance work exploring the choreographer’s European and Black South African heritage, and which sees Vogue, Contemporary, Ballet, Acogny and an African dance aesthetic co-exist within one body.
Witter-Johnson’s mother, a schoolteacher, was in a Ghanaian dance troupe and brought her young daughter along to rehearsals. Consequently the rhythms and gestures of West African drumming and movement are a key point of reference in her work, recently exemplified in Ocean Floor – an album featuring Witter-Johnson as cellist and vocalist accompanied by the LSO Percussion Ensemble. The 12-track live album pulls together the eighteenth-century atrocity committed aboard the Zong, where 130 enslaved people were purposely thrown overboard, and a tragic event witnessed by Witter-Johnson in Jamaica in which a young man lost his life to the ocean.
