The Rosetta Circle is a creative response to Rosetta Reitz’ musical archive of care -- a performance collective of care. We explore how to continue the spirit of Rosetta's work and honor the unsung foremothers of jazz with collaboration and multiple viewpoints. The structure and the practice of the circle is designed to speak back to the music business's harmful practices like racism, sexism, unfair wages and leaving women out of the story.  Our work pursues music's ability to amplify public history and make change.  This project is a pilot for an ongoing social justice-minded performance collective.  A first Rosetta Circle in-progress performance pilot this April features Adia Victoria, Rissi Palmer, Shirlette Ammons, Shana Tucker and Tift Merritt and begins our work exploring how the women of Rosetta Records speak to today. Unmanageable is thrilled to produce the first Rosetta Circle in tandem with Duke Performances and Tift Merritt.

The Blue Hour is an evening length song cycle commissioned by Boston-based string orchestra A Far Cry, and born of a unique collaboration between five composers: Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Set to excerpts from 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize winner Carolyn Forché’s epic abecedarian poem, “On Earth,” the music follows one woman’s journey through the liminal space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images.

Hungry River is a performance collaboration between songwriter and community historian Tift Merritt, illuminating the prophetic importance of the people in an unexplored box of patient photographs from a 1920s-era segregated North Carolina asylum, and a portrait of how the vulnerable carry the soul of a society. A collection of songs and monologues, a ceremony, a meditation, a community history - this creative intervention sings loudly: who are these people, and what must we learn from them?

The Way Forth, a folk opera and film by composer Rachel Grimes, is an experiential, non-linear journey following generations of Kentucky women’s voices from 1775 to today. Inspired by a treasure-trove of family documents, photos, and letters, Grimes began in 2016 to research some of the more vexing questions that came to the surface about these people, places, and events, and discovered alongside a counter-narrative of the exploitation of people and resources that marks Kentucky’s history, and, ultimately, the expansion of America.