climate

community

culture

ceremony

care

climate community culture ceremony care

JPS is excited to announce its 2025 season, Sojourn to Ellum which takes us to Ashfield, MA, Durham, NC and Utica, MS. Sojourn to Ellum features JPS’ flagship community engagement offering black/water, holy waters: a digital ceremony and the final episode of “in the name of the m/other tree”, titled “again, the watercarriers.”

Ignited by generations of people who have sought sovereignty and utopia in nature, JPS’ season is a call to ceremony that invites us all into a deeper practice of working in service of a more just world.

Unfolding between August and November 2025, Sojourn to Ellum takes JPS to NYC, Ashfield, MA, Durham, NC and Utica, MS as the Studio continues its climate reparations and environmental justice cultural organizing cosmology, Watering (W)hole. The goal of the season is to invite our beloved community into deeper kinship with the planet and each other. Sojourn to Ellum is a durational community ceremony in which we collectively remember and fortify the movement for climate reparations and environmental justice through ancient and emergent sacred and secular rituals

Executive Producer and Lead Artist Ebony Noelle Golden said, “This season is a deep meditation on restorative solutions and practices of remediation, rematriation and re-igniting just relations among people and the planet. I am so excited to learn, listen and collaborate with the brilliant artists, activists and healers who have been magnetized to the work and service our collective calling requires.” Unfolding as a series of public rituals, performances, learning ceremonies and research experiences, and digital encounters, JPS hopes to collectively source rituals, remedies and recipes for climate reparations and environmental justice through an intersectional, ecowomanist framework guided by five thematic imperatives.

Ceremony: In the beginning of time, ceremony has been the site of ritual, revelation and revolution. Sojourn to Ellum has required that we activate our ancient ways of gathering to both plot self-determined approaches to cultivating right-relationship with our beloved planet. At each stop, Sojourn to Ellum will unfold as a ceremony designed to support the movement for planetary connection, environmental justice and climate reparations.

Creativity: Creativity is a limitless well of possibility. Sojourn to Ellum has allowed JPS to experience the ways in which artists, farmers, healers, spiritualists, teachers and organizers remap the policies and practices designed to root and route our communities in systems of subjugation. Our creativity is our liberation. Together we will imagine how we can individually and collectively venerate the movement for climate justice in urban and rural settings?

Culture: Culture is our collective birthright. It is where we come alive and is where we learn the ways of our kinfolks and others. Together, we will uplift the cultural and community-powered ways our people, ancestors to the youth, have lived in allyship with the earth.

Climate: Consider climate as weather conditions that affect the spaces and places we inhabit and steward. In a time when many believe it is too late to recoup and repair the damage humans have done to the earth, it is even more important to re-imagine and re-build our relationship with the planet. Together we can shift the forecast for our communities through seeding a new paradigm that supports the holistic thriving of our built and natural world.

Care: We must care for each other. No one should be sacrificed in the pursuit of justice and reparations. JPS centers reciprocity and care in this season because we recognize that the unfair expectation to hold communities together has unfairly impacted some of the elders and ancestors we hold dear. It is for this reason we practice equity and fairness in work load, pay, creative collaboration, rest and wellness in our creative and cultural work.

Join us and stay tuned to what we are up to by visiting us on instagram @jupiterperformancestudio.

This season is supported by Mississippi Center for Culture Productions, Double Edge Theatre, Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts/National Theatre Project, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Support Jupiter Performance Studio by making a donation today!

Join jps as we Sojourn to Ellum