Solo Magic

Always. Already. Inherently.

Keeper of Sadness | August 1 & 2 | Union Station | Seattle, WA

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SeattleArts

Across time.
Across memory.
Across generations.
Across possibility.
In every dimension at once.
Uncollapsed.
Undeniable.
Black Womxn Are HERE.

Keeper of Sadness | August 1 & 2 | Union Station | Seattle, WA

RSVP at Link in Bio.

SeattleArts

In every culture that has survived something unsurvivable, community is the technology.

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August 1 & 2. Union Station. Seattle.
👉🏾RSVP at Link in Bio

Dance Artist Nile Alicia Ruff
📸 J. Rycheal

For nearly a decade, Keeper of Sadness has grown through conversations, residencies, work-in-progress showings, research, healing workshops, and community engagement. Today, that work continues...

30 Black Womxn entrusted the Keeper of Sadness with more than 40 hours of testimony. Their faces, voices, and stories have been woven together to create an Ancestral Avatar. She is not one womxn’s story, but a collective presence shaped by many. 

Keeper of Sadness
August 1 & 2 | Union Station | Seattle, WA
Free & Open to the public
RSVP at the link in our bio.

Shout out to every magical being who contributed their voice. Your trust, your truth, and your testimony made her possible. She exists because you said yes.

With gratitude to Cristina Orbe and Dani Tirrell for helping shape the questions that opened these conversations, to Arif Gürsel for holding them on camera The Union 📍SEA, and to ＡＮＡＴＯＬＡ for building what emerged from them.

We need YOU!

We are seeking 12 volunteers to help hold space for Keeper of Sadness on August 1 & 2 at Union Station. Join Us!

Volunteer link in bio.

March 2026.

We gathered for the first time , bringing sound, technology, and choreography into one room to map what August will hold.

What had lived in pieces finally found its shape.

Slide 1 and
Slide 2 and [email protected]
Slide 3 .thelionking
Slide 4 .thelionking, ,
Slide 5
Slide 6
Slide 7
Slide 8

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📸 Images by

My mommy has always told me, “Can’t nobody tell you when you’re tired.”

I have been holding onto those words. Because if I’m being honest, this season and many before have been heavy for me. And I know for so many of you, too.

The losses. The parents we are now parenting. The family we have lost. Our younger selves navigating healing. Smiling while in pain. The silencing and trauma we are still surviving. The grief we keep reliving.

I see you in all of it. Because I am in it too.

Since 2018, I have been sitting with Black Womxn. Listening to what we carry, what we survive, what we become when we are finally, truly witnessed. Keeper of Sadness was created for a moment exactly like this one. Not to celebrate our strength. Not to prove our resilience. But to hold the full truth of what it costs to be us and what becomes possible when we stop carrying it…alone. This is a work in progress, and so am I.

It is also the most personal thing I have ever made public.

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SeattleArtScene

She belongs to no single womxn because she is born from AND contains many.

The Ancestral Avatar emerges from the faces, voices, and testimonies of thirty Black Womxn.

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SeattleDance