Meet the creative team of WILDFIRE: Before the Bloom.
Support our first fully produced show!
No Exit Theatre Collective is excited to announce WILDFIRE: Before the Bloom!
WILDFIRE: Before the Bloom is a live, multimedia theatre project created by Black artists. This production seeks to express liberation and joy in the face of oppression. Through song, spoken word, dance, movement, and guided meditation, WILDFIRE’s goal is to create a space for Black catharsis.
Courtney Bryan Devon, director/creator of WILDFIRE:
“This project arose out of waves of trauma brewed in the heat of 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 crisis and amidst a spike in civil rights protesting for Black lives. There was a need to encapsulate this moment, particularly the journeys of healing these times have thrust us into, as Black folks experiencing compounded trauma.”
Support this project, and the artists working on it by donating to our Paypal.
No Exit, from its inception, has set out to be a radical theatre space. It is our goal to create and collaborate on art that challenges the white, hetero, cis, male, American, colonial, imperialist, capitalist, racist gaze. We are proud to present our first original work: one that is deeply anti-racist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist, and focused on providing mutual aid.
In the face of COVID-19, No Exit has forged an online space with hundreds of artists. The theatre community, like many others, has faced tumult and stagnation. This announcement comes on the heels of the news that Broadway will stay shuttered until at least Spring 2021. Despite this news, we press on to make theatre and create meaningful art. No Exit has become not only a place of creativity, but a place of community. After a few months of reading the classic works of others, we were ready for the next step.
Over the past months, No Exit Theatre Collective has been developing our first original production: “WILDFIRE: Before the Bloom.” Helmed by Director Courtney Bryan Devon, WILDFIRE celebrates Black Art and Joy and imagines Black liberation. Courtney has assembled a team of incredible Black artists, who we are so excited to introduce in this newsletter. WILDFIRE is a collaboration between Black writers, musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors and poets. WILDFIRE is for Black people, especially those who are queer/trans/gender non-conforming.
WILDFIRE will have two main elements: a digital presentation, streamed October 28-29, and a live outdoor event on October 30. More details on how you can experience WILDFIRE will follow on our Substack (so make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter!).
WILDFIRE will be shared with an all-Black audience, using pre-recorded vignettes and live performance to immerse us in a participatory arts healing experience. Our live event will be a socially distant, outdoor vigil and community action space. We intend to create a radical space for mutual aid, where Black people can come together to heal and to provide mental and physical health support for each other. We aim to materially support and uplift our Black audience, inviting in organizations to provide essential services such as care packages (food, clothing, and such), PPE, etc.
As we get into a critical stage of the project, we come upon the crucial point to secure funds for our artists and equipment needs. We need to raise $1,000 by October 25 to adequately pay the Black artists on this project, as well as to secure equipment for the live show.
We believe in mutual aid. No amount of support is too small, and you can donate through our Paypal or arrange other ways to support, including: in-kind donations of outdoor space, equipment, day-of support, marketing boosts, etc. All donations will receive a credit during the performance. Any institution that would like to join us as a co-producer, please let us know. If you are interested in engaging in our effort of mutual aid through your abilities or healing practices, please let us know.
No Exit honors the labor of the Black creatives of WILDFIRE, who have committed themselves to this work. We invite any and all forms of support that can directly support our creative team, whether it is financial or in the form of groceries, personal care products, etc.
Any questions should be directed to noexittc@gmail.com.
This is a chance for you to be a producer on a unique piece of art that serves this current moment in history in a meaningful, generative way.
Creative Team
Courtney Bryan Devon, Director/Creator/Producer/Cast
Bryanna Bradley, Dramaturg/Research/Cast
Caren Celine Morris, Production Management Consultant
Briyana Clarel, Lead Writer,
Sade Murray, Choreography/Cast
Vernon Jordan III, Visual Director
RJ Christian, Music Director/Cast
Collaborator
Isis Bruno, cast
Mars Rucker, cast
Jackie Alexis, cast
Tsebiyah Derry, cast
Andre Chance Goddard, cast
Rodolfo Soto, cast
Courtney Bryan Devon (he/they) is a Black, Queer, Brooklyn-based Artist, Activist, and Educator. Through theatre, dance, and music, he creates revealing, reviving and revolutionizing intra-community experiences.
A classically trained conservatory alumnus of Shakespeare & Company, Barrington Stage Company, and a lifelong learner of companies to come, he exists as an unlikely recipient of an exceptional arts education with which he reinvests into marginalized communities as a teaching artist. Courtney is a proud founding member and Artistic Coordinator of Black Shakespeare Project.
As a dancer, martial artist, and fitness professional, Courtney motivates through motion, bringing folks together for fellowship, fortification, and fun. As a poet and three time Champion of the Massachusetts Poetry Out Loud State Competitions (‘13,’14,’16), an actor and an orator, Courtney’s intimate affair with language lives at the heart of all his work.
A descendant of Jamaican and Southern American chattel slavery, actively healing from intergenerational trauma, Courtney currently centers his work around the prioritization of healing justice for other Black queer people in the Brooklyn area and greater United States. Being marginalized and a trauma survivor, he uses art to facilitate therapeutic environments of restorative and transformative Justice in the pursuit of Radical Joy. In all things, Courtney strives to be a harbinger for healing and for hope, ultimately elevating and empowering (Black, Queer) people through health and humanity. He shares the sentiments of Maya Angelou that “my mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” @coourtinator
Bryanna Bradley (she/her) is a body based broad, notorious ballet class crybaby, and Queens native circa 1995. In July 2016, Bradley trained at The School at Jacob’s Pillow under the tutelage of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women) and shadowed Camille A. Brown through her Black Girl Spectrum (BGS) program. Bradley premiered her dance work buck: an exploration of black masculinity in Nick Cave’s exhibit ‘Until’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA ) while scrambling to finish college. Bradley has performed for other artists like band Arc Iris, poet Danielle Legros Georges, and choreographer Mersiha Mesihovic/Circuit Debris.
Caren Celine Morris (she/her) is a multidisciplinary theatre artist from The Bronx. She aims to promote inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in all of her projects. Caren has worked on projects at The Tank, and with Right Angle Entertainment, Quill Entertainment Company, The Cradle Theatre Company, the New York Musical Festival, and The Bushwick Starr.
Briyana D. Clarel (they/them) is a Black queer non-binary dreamer, storyteller, and curator living in Philadelphia. They explore truth, healing, and joy through theatre, sketch comedy, writing, and teaching. Briyana is the founder of The Starfruit Project, a platform highlighting creativity for radical healing and brilliant growth. Their writing is published in TAYO Literary Magazine, cavity, Black Youth Project, MELANINzine, and print anthologies. As a director, performer, and playwright, Briyana has brought stories to life with the Painted Bride Art Center, OUTsider Festival, Shoe Box Theatre Collective, Dixon Place, Broad Views on Broadway, Cabernet Cabaret ATX, Philly Free Fringe, and more. They are a 2016 recipient of the Acts of Greatness LGBTQ Youth Community Award and a 2020-2021 Core Playwright with InterAct Theatre Company. Born and raised in South Jersey, Briyana loves sleep, taro bubble tea, and ferns. Keep up with their adventures at briyanaclarel.com and @briyanaclarel.
Sade Murray (she/her) As the choreographer of this piece, Sade would like to recognize that this role doesn’t just handle what the dancing looks like. It is to be able to translate emotion and story without words, a culmination of many different art forms. Sade is honored to work with friends who have similar passions through technology, writing, visual art and graphic design, costuming, music, and so much more. Thank you to our creative team.
Vernon Jordan, III (he/his/they/them) is a Philly-born ‘n raised writer, filmmaker, and poet. He is interested in stories about the interior lives of Black people, and carries a lifelong fascination with the intimate, the supernatural and otherwise speculative/magical/funky shit. His priority is the merging of the visual and the musical -- a visual lyricist, as it were. A graduate of Muhlenberg College (’16), with a B.A. in a self-designed major called Black Voice & Cultural Studies, his thesis film See My Dreams Come True has played at over five US-national and international festivals, including Blackstar Film Festival.
In 2019, Vernon completed a Screenwriting MFA from Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema; and in addition to advancing to a final consideration round at Sundance New Voices Youtube Episodic Lab, and served as a panel moderator on Black film curation and preservation at New York’s Upside Film Festival, based in Harlem. His latest short film, DEEP CUTS, is forthcoming.
Vernon has led screenwriting workshops, masterclasses, staged readings, and lectures at colleges and universities across the East Coast, and has since returned home to Philly as a Teaching Artist at Big Picture Alliance. His film work lives on Vimeo, while his prose and poetry have homes on Huffington Post, The Establishment, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Catapult Community. You can find Vernon modeling in New York with WeSpeak NY.
With this project Wildfire, Vernon joins the team as Visual Director.
RJ Christian (he/him) is a Black actor, dancer, singer, composer and human being in his senior year at NYU Steinhardt. He is excited to continue working on Wildfire after performing in No Exit’s readings of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Iphigenia in Aulis. He is currently working on an EP to be released this year as well trying to get TikTok Famous.