Presidential Plenary: "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free," a performance led by Joshuah Campbell and Roopa Mahadevan

This performance is a communal, participatory engagement with the sound, feeling, and archive of freedom struggle. Borrowing its title from Billy Taylor’s 1963 song made popular in 1967 by Nina Simone, the performance takes inspiration from 1) the artists’ own performing arts roots: Indian classical bhakti tradition and African-American spiritual and gospel tradition, and 2) the artistic works of other communities who have historically exerted and asserted their freedom in the face of oppression. They will engage the audience in interactive musical prompts to explore how the use of the voice/body, spontaneous art-making, and improvisation can be a tool for building community, strength, and joy. Co-led by composer-vocalists Roopa Mahadevan and Joshuah Brian Campbell, the performance will be generative, experimental, and grounded in traditions of communal music-making as organizing and catalyzing moments. It argues that, across history, oppressed people have sung themselves beyond the bounds of their reality into what Ashon Crawley calls an “otherwise possibility,” and that in rehearsing these modes of musicking together, we can attempt to enact –to use Robin D. G. Kelley’s language–their “freedom dreams.” The presentation explores freedom both as feeling and as a real condition constructed correlative to constraint, creativity, and catharsis.