Monkey Gone to Heaven

Monkey Gone to Heaven is inspired by the dynamic relationship between primates and prayer. Primates and prayer? They make an uneasy couple, but both give us ways to understand who we are as humans. Non-human primates share all but the tiniest fraction of our evolutionary history and can provide a glimpse into our own animal nature. The act of prayer reaches toward divinity, telling us who we are through the lens of what we aspire to be. EmSpace Dance braids these subjects with a mixture of reverence and skepticism, gravity and play, and with an eye toward the primal and the divine that exist across human cultures and within each of us.

Monkey Gone to Heaven is dances, stories, songs and musings about primates and prayer: doubt and faith and our primate ancestors... the possibilities of submission... a transcendent encounter with a gorilla... meditation and the distractions that keep you from doing it “right”... a girl who loses her tail... and the ways we reach out for connection. This full-length work is being developed in collaboration with a stellar group of multi-disciplinary performers (actor and musician El Beh, dancer Jennifer Chien, dancer/ choreographer Kat Cole, actor Michael Mohammed, dance theater dame Rowena Richie, actor and director Christopher W. White) under the direction of “protean” EmSpace artistic director Erin Mei-Ling Stuart. Additional artistic collaborators include composer Erik Pearson, production/lighting designer Allen Willner, costumer Sonsherée Giles and dramaturg/advisor Marilee Talkington.