Live Arts | Listening Party + Reading with Everett Saunders & Marjani Forté-Saunders

About the Event

Join the artists of 7NMS for an intimate evening of music, poetry, food, drink, and celebration.

Their latest performance Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, has evolved in relation to each unique venue, city, and community in which it’s been performed. The MCA’s presentation of Prophet, represents the culmination of a year of relationship-building with organizations, artists, and archives. Drawn to Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood as an important historic center of African American life and culture, the duo engaged Miyagi Records as the perfect site to gather in community for a listening party, book reading, and celebratory reception.

A meditation on how the trajectory of one artist’s journey sits within a larger lineage of Black creative experimentation, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist runs for three nights in the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater.

Attendees at this event receive a 10% discount when they purchase tickets to Prophet. Discount code available at the event.

About Our Partner

Miyagi Records 

Located in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, the shops name, Miyagi Records, says it all. In the Japanese language, “Miyagi” means shrine fortress. It’s about protecting the intangible and precious. Influenced by the hyper-curated, hidden away vinyl shops of Tokyo, Japan, Miyagi’s goal is to become your ‘secret spot.’ The crane in its logo is a symbol for longevity and prosperity in Japanese culture. Miyagi Records embodies these concepts. Founded in late 2019 as a humble side project during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the store became a way for its founders to stay connected with music lovers and to continue sharing their love for arts and culture and creating their own path to prosperity. Most of the music found at Miyagi is created by musicians of color, and this informs its business ethics. As a BIPOC-owned store, Miyagi aims to serve the diverse Southside community by showcasing the vibrant musical legacy of Chicago’s Southside and by offering its our patrons high quality customer service and fair prices.

Miyagi is a proud member of Rebuild Foundation’s Creative Entrepreneurship program. Collaborating with Theaster Gates and his organization has been critical to implementing the vision of the store’s founders. Miyagi is a part of the Arts Block, whose footprint once included boxer Joe Louis’ famed Rhumboogie Café, and is proud to honor the area’s rich cultural history.

About the Artists

Operating in California and New York, 7NMS is the public emergence of Marjani Forté-Saunders and Everett Saunders’s work as a collaborative team, radically engaging art as a medium of elevation, healing, and futurity. With seven award-winning projects in the last 10 years, 7NMS totes a revolutionary commitment to Black radical imagination. Prophet is an awardee of the 2020 MAP Fund, the 2020 New Music USA Award, and the 2022[GS7] National Dance Project Production and Touring grant.

Marjani is a 2019 FCA Fellowship awardee, a three-time Bessie award winner, and an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill, Dance USA, and UBW Choreographic Center Fellowships. Everett is the composer and thought-partner behind the award-winning and internationally touring production Memoirs of a … Unicorn and a two-time New Music USA Awardee. His recent work can be found as composer/sound designer on Jaamil Kosoko’s Chameleon, Mayfield Brooks’s Whale Fall, and Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories (2018).

While 7NMS incubated Prophet during Fall 2020 and Winter 2021 residencies in newly erected home studios, 7NMS also worked in close collaboration with co-visionaries d. Sabela grimes (movement composer and sound archivist), Meena Murugesan (filmmaker and media designer), and Marc Winston (photographer), to produce Prophet’s latest filmic iteration, commissioned by dance center Jacob’s Pillow.