By Marijean Wegert
I have heard rave reviews about Hadestown as a musical! What is your favorite thing about this masterful adaptation of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus?
The show is a testament that good things take time. The musical Hadestown was developed by Anais Mitchell and her creative collaborators over a 13-year period before making it to Broadway. The musical is truly immaculate. Singing the music and embodying Fate is something my younger self who dreamed of making their Broadway debut is so geeked about. My 10-year journey since destiny won me the Jimmy Award in 2015 led me on a twisty Fated Journey that led to debuting on Broadway in 2025.
I have heard that Atropos the third fate is the fate with the lowest voice. Are you a contralto!! As a non-singer myself, I’m intrigued… What’s it like to play a Fate!?
Yessss! I am a contralto bellowing into the warmth of my voice with support from my superstar voice coach STARR BUSBY. Playing Fate was different between tour and Broadway – the songs and most choreo were the same, but Fate showed up in my life and body differently. It was amazing to embody the muse manifesting life for other characters in the story, too – it was very much a reflection of my truth as a siren warrior and community-building muse in the world beyond the Broadway stage.
You were seriously injured during your performances in Hadestown. How has that experience shaped you, invited you, ruined you, or liberated you?
I was injured 3 times total in my journey to Hell: in July (my birthday month by the way, veryway very Saturn Return redirection) I suffered from a shoulder strain due to the accordion playing and a right hip labrum tear that took me out of the show. I’ve danced and have been an athlete all my life so this was my first time dealing with injuries like this. Broadway expects us to be MVP athletes without preventative MVP athlete care. I didn’t have the luxury of taking a pay cut for calling out of the show, so after two months of recovery and a steroid shot to the hip, I returned to the 8-show week for 3.5 weeks, before I injured my left hip and was out of the show for 4 months.
It changed my life in ways that will show up more fully as I recover the fullness of my creative practices. I’ve learned that pleasure is the medicine. That I felt unsafe to exist in my abundance as a Haitian trans liberator with my place of work so publicly accessible. I found who my community TRULY is, and most importantly, I learned how much of my energy was leaking while making history as the first full time Afrikan Trans Broadway performer steering a radical community organization. I will be sharing more about my rebirths in my cabaret, A Goddess Reborn and its docuseries sibling The Fated Journey in divine time!
In your nonprofit bio and your interviews, you talk about ritual as a co-creative possibility. How does ritual form you and what is its role in a liberatory community? What kind of rituals are holding your body and your community right now?
As a shapeshifting multipowered artist and human surviving and centering pleasure revolution through the times, liberation comes through as the somatic ritual it is! Liberation isn’t something that can only be explained but must be FELT, embodied, and practiced. My rituals remind me of that fact and are constantly in flow to meet where my life is. Still there are practices that are nonnegotiables for my freedom to manifest in my days.
My daily movement in the mornings when I rise and evenings before bed, calling friends and family, journaling, candle magic, ancestral veneration, shaking my ass to my oldest playlists, having time on my roof to soak in the views of Flatbush and sun if it’s out, to name a few that hold me personally. In community, I am in the midst of reorienting to expand from the ritual I created to survive the 8-show week, beginning to hold my budding creative mycelium network: Lakay Productions (seed-funded by my workers comp checks). This organization exists to open portals that illuminate new ways for my community of radical creatives to represent each other while ritualizing our art centering ancestral memory, pleasure, collapse survival training, and building capacity to endure these times. We out here building bridges from this dying world to the new world we’re designing! Its roots are deep and we’re seeing the sprouts pop out above ground. I am excited to keep on dreaming in ritual with this community! You can follow along @lakay.productions for more as we prepare to share our mission!
What do you want people to know about your nonprofit, Claim Our Space NOW? How does it cohere with your ethos and embodied life as an artist? What kind of collaborations and invitations are you offering and connecting?
Before the embodied ritual of Claim Our Space NOW came to life through our beloved Marsha’s Closet, the vision for the online resource hub arrived in 2020 when I was seeking ways to get involved with the movement safely while living with my grandmother in lockdown. I had seen enough hashtags circling the interwebs and not concerted efforts to attack the system that perpetuated these lynchings. That is when our resource directories were born, to make it easy for anyone with access to the internet to tap into spaces near them to find Black and global majority life saving resources AND for people looking to volunteer to tap in too. Our work has become less national and more local to NYC over the years so our focus has shifted.
Building community is a creative practice that empowers us to envision a future beyond this hellscape designed by colonizers and our activations give us space to dream, learn, rage, expand in our liberation together. Claim Our Space NOW is an ever changing ethos held together by rituals we are designing to meet our differing capacities amidst collapse and challenging us to meet the people as fully embodied humans, not saviors.
Liberation is a creative practice too!! And Claim Our Space NOW has seen almost 6 years of life so far because of our commitment to the art of connection and shared decolonial values. When we say everyone has a role in the movement, we want people to know this work is meant to come from a place that feels good, and can be sustained for more than a moment – for LIFE. Collaborations we are seeking are with spaces that facilitate healing and can lead workshops at our events. We are especially looking for collaborators who are ready to volunteer hours to support with volunteer coordination, in person support at events and more. You can stay tuned for the direct needs through our substack!
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