The Day of Orature

CLINTON SQUARE, SYRACUSE, NY — SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2026

In downtown Syracuse, Central New York gathered for its first public festival dedicated entirely to the spoken, sung, and performed word.

This was not our destination. It was our arrival.

That was the Foundation’s own framing going into July 18th, and it held. The Day of Orature was conceived as a single afternoon — but it was built on a much longer premise: that Orature is a living vessel of memory, dignity, and knowledge, and that the community that carries it forward deserves a public square to do so in.

For one afternoon, Clinton Square became exactly that. A traditional West African tribute opened the day; Onondaga Nation leadership offered welcome and blessing on the land the festival stood on; children’s storytellers and a youth band shared the stage with seasoned orators and spoken-word poets; and throughout, Professor Mũgo herself was present — her recorded voice and image threading the live program together. It was the Foundation’s first public event in the city it calls home, and the city Professor Mũgo called home.

I love the intergenerational and cross cultural dialogue happening here.

Pierce Freelon, Master of Ceremony

The Day, In Brief

By the Numbers

4Orature Categories

Oral Storytelling · Spoken Word Poetry · Song-Based Narrative · Call & Response

5Languages on Stage

Onondaga · Twi · Spanish · English · Arabic

4Youth Orature Performers

Lianna Perez-Sedkyh · Angelina Marte · Franchezca Alejos · Karla Lima

4Musical Performances

David Etse Nyadedzor · Adamfo Ensemble · La Casita Banda (“Chan Chan”) · La Casita Banda (“Guantanamera”)

7Adult Performers

Vanessa Johnson · Ricky Maeweather · Aziyanna Chavis · Sundiata Salaam · Tasneem Ansariyah Grace · Jackie Grace · Dr. Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo

4Foundation Youth Prizes

2nd Runner-Up · 1st Runner-Up · Outstanding Prize for Orature

How the Day Opened

A Tribute, Then a Welcome

Forgoing announcement and proclamations, we chose instead to open the program with breath and rhythm — two forms Orature has always taken.

A Ceremonial Ashanti Dirge

The Day of Orature began with a traditional Ashanti dirge, performed by David Etse Nyadedzor on the Atenteben — the bamboo flute of the Akan people of Ghana. The Atenteben has long carried the dirge tradition at funerals and memorial services across Ghana: soft, breathy, and deliberately pensive, it is understood to speak on behalf of the living, honoring those who came before. With the event coinciding with the third anniversary celebration of Dr. Mũgo’s passing, Nyadedzor’s performance, delicate and unhurried, was offered in that same spirit — a tribute to ancestors.

The dirge was immediately followed by a live drum and dance performance from Adamfo Ensemble, shifting the register from reflection to celebration and formally welcoming the public into Clinton Square. Together, the two performances set the day’s own rhythm in miniature: honor the ancestors first, then invite the living to gather.

The Land, Its People, The Welcome

A Rare and Deliberate Honor

Before a single Orature performer took the stage, the day belonged to the Haudenosaunee — on whose ancestral land Clinton Square stands.

The occasion was graced by three Onondaga Nation leaders: Tadodaho Sidney Hill, Turtle Clan Mother Freida Jacques, and Eel Clan Mother Virginia Abrams. The Day of Orature opened with a traditional Thanksgiving Address delivered entirely in the Onondaga language by Tadodaho Sidney Hill — the Haudenosaunee’s own “words before all else,” offered before every significant gathering to give thanks to the natural world. Tadodaho is a lifetime position and the only title chosen by unanimous agreement of the Confederacy’s other forty-nine chiefs; Tadodaho presides over the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee and, by tradition, is always drawn from the Onondaga Nation, the Confederacy’s designated “Keepers of the Central Fire.” Turtle Clan Mother Freida Jacques then offered the English-language translation and greetings that followed.

Tadodaho, Haudenosaunee Confederacy

Sidney Hill

The spiritual leader of the Six Nations — Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Mohawk, Seneca, and Tuscarora — Tadodaho Sidney Hill opened the festival with the traditional Thanksgiving Address, spoken entirely in the Onondaga language.

Turtle Clan Mother, Onondaga Nation

Freida Jacques

Turtle Clan Mother Freida Jacques delivered the English-language welcome and greetings, extending the Thanksgiving Address to the full festival audience.

Eel Clan Mother, Onondaga Nation

Virginia Abrams

Eel Clan Mother Virginia Abrams joined in welcoming the community, part of a matrilineal leadership presence anchoring the day’s opening.

Why It Matters

Clan Mothers & Matrilineal Leadership

Within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, clan mothers select and can remove chiefs — a matrilineal system of governance often described as among the oldest continuous participatory democracies in the world. That two clan mothers stood at the center of the Foundation’s opening felt, fittingly, like an echo of the Foundation’s own namesake: a woman whose life’s work was likewise about voice, inheritance, and who gets to carry a tradition forward.

Looking Back To Look Forward

Dr. Mũgo's Presence

The Day of Orature was built not only in Professor Mũgo’s honor, but also to further engagement in the discipline — so it was built with her voice inside it, not just about it.

Two Appearances, One Throughline

The Foundation made a deliberate choice to let Professor Mũgo’s own voice and image steer the day — looking back in order to look forward. Her first appearance came early: a short lecture recording in which she reflects, in her own words, on what Orature is. Her second appearance came later in the program, when a recording of her reciting her own call-and-response poem, “Where Are Those Songs?,” joined the adult performers live on stage — her voice from the recording answered, in real time, by the performers in front of the audience.

Rather than a tribute performed about her, it was a performance rendered with her.

A Soundtrack Built From Her Words

Threaded beneath the performances all day was a specially curated and produced soundtrack setting lyrics drawn from Professor Mũgo’s own poetry to original music — rhythms interlaced with her words, played between and beneath the live Orature performances. It gave the day a second, quieter register of her presence, and introduced her work in a new format to audiences encountering it for the first time.

Our Master of Ceremony

No Better Person for the Job

The Day of Orature was built not only in Professor Mũgo’s honor, but also to further engagement in the discipline — so it was built with her voice inside it, not just about it.

Pierce Freelon

Pierce Freelon is a Grammy-nominated musician, author, and educator from Durham, North Carolina, and an alumnus of Syracuse University, where he first encountered Professor Mũgo’s teaching. He is the co-creator of Beat Making Lab, an Emmy Award-winning PBS web series that has taught hip hop production to youth on four continents, and the creator of the Grammy-nominated children’s albums Black to the Future and AnceStars. A former Durham City Council member and founder of Blackspace, an Afrofuturist digital makerspace for Black youth, Freelon has spent his career at the exact intersection The Day of Orature asked him to stand in: tradition, performance, and young people finding their own voice.

He led the day from open to close with the ease of someone who has spent a career doing precisely this — introducing performers, reading judges’ bios, framing Dr. Mũgo’s recorded reflections, and keeping hours of live programming moving with care, warmth, wit, audience engagement and a fluent command of Orature’s own traditions. As he put it from the stage: “I love the intergenerational and cross cultural dialogue happening here.”

The Youth Orature Showcase & Competition

Traditions Carried By the Next Generation

Young performers, ranging from age six to fourteen, brought two distinct oral traditions to the stage — Cuban song-based narrative and Mesoamerican storytelling.

La Casita Banda · Song-Based Narrative

"Chan Chan"

Composed — or, as Compay Segundo told it, dreamed — from a childhood folk tale, “Chan Chan” became one of the most recognized songs in the world through the Buena Vista Social Club. It is, at its heart, an oral story passed hand to hand across generations before it was ever written down: exactly the inheritance the Foundation built this festival to honor, performed here by a multi-instrument youth band carrying a Cuban folk tradition forward.

La Casita Banda · Song-Based Narrative

"Guantanamera"

Cuba’s most famous patriotic song sets a simple, endlessly adaptable melody to verses drawn from José Martí’s “Versos Sencillos” — the poetry of Cuba’s national independence hero, written in exile. The song has long been Orature in practice: a shared verse form, sung by different voices to say different things across a century. La Casita’s youth performance carried that same tradition — a story that belongs to everyone who sings it.

Oral Storytelling

The Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos)

Subsequent youth storytellers performed original oral storytelling pieces drawing on the themes of Día de los Muertos — a tradition with roots more than 3,000 years old in Indigenous Mesoamerican ritual among the Aztec, Toltec, and Maya, who understood death not as an ending but as a continuation of life and an act of ancestral veneration. The resonance with the day’s own purpose needs little explanation: a festival built to honor an ancestor, performed in part by children telling stories about how the dead remain present among the living.

Youth Orature Showcase

Emerging Voices

Lianna Perez-Sedkyh, Leonardo Perez-Sedkyh, Angelina Marte, Franchezca Alejos, Karla Lima, and Albert Alejos performed as La Casita Banda; Lianna, Angelina, Franchezca, and Karla each also performed individual Oral Storytelling pieces, bringing bilingual, intergenerational tradition to the Youth Orature Showcase & Competition’s very first year.

Our Adult Performers

Five Voices, Five Traditions

Five Threads, One Cloth

Vanessa Johnson opened the block with a Botswana animal tale about a lion who mistook leadership for domination, and a rabbit clever enough to remind him that hunger — the plainest, most democratic force there is — outranks any crown. It’s the oldest kind of Orature there is: a story a child can follow and an adult can sit with for years, teaching without ever announcing that it’s teaching.

Sundiata Salaam followed with two poems built from very different registers of devotion. “Breath” is a love poem addressed to something larger than any one person, felt across faiths and finally spoken in Arabic prayer at its close — love that refuses to be confined to one tongue or tradition. “I Travelled to the Soul Plane Once” answered it with memory: a vision of the afterlife where bell hooks needs a ride from the airport, where his mother waits for him the way she waited in life, and where Fannie Lou Hamer, Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, and Ida B. Wells all sit together, unburdened. Ancestry, in Salaam’s hands, isn’t distant. It’s a mother who dropped her son off in Syracuse for grad school and cried the whole way home.

Aziyanna Chavis carried that same lineage forward and made it fiercer. “Geveneration” claims Black womanhood — “reborn of Cherokee descent” — as inheritance rather than performance, and “ProfiTess” turns to confront everyone who has ever profited from that inheritance without paying for it: “everything that I declare for me will always be mine.”

Ricky Maeweather answered from the other direction, moving from confrontation to tenderness across “Black” and “My Neighborhood Garden” — the first an unflinching account of what his ancestors survived and what his people refuse to apologize for, the second a love letter to a Syracuse block where kids “grow wings in corner stores” and community is the one inheritance that was never taken.

Tasneem Ansariyah Grace closed the block the way a griot often does: with a joke that turns into wisdom. Her call-and-response folktale, “Too Much Noise,” follows a man who can’t find peace in his own home until an elder sends him, animal by animal, further from comfort — only so he can recognize what he already had. The audience answered every creak, clack, and crow back to her, and by the end they’d done more than laugh. They’d practiced the very thing the day was built around: a story handed forward, voice to voice, until it belongs to everyone in the room.

Oral Storytelling

Vanessa Johnson

“Children’s Tales: Animal World from Africa and the African Diaspora”

Read Bio

Vanessa Johnson is a Griot in the West African tradition — a storyteller, quilter, fiber artist, arts educator, museum consultant, activist, writer, playwright, actor, and vocalist. She is the Matilda Joslyn Gage Artist in Residence (2022–present), a 2022–24 Creators Rebuild NY Grant recipient, and a 2026 CNY Arts “Syracuse Award” finalist. Johnson uses her art forms to tell traditional tales from Africa and the African Diaspora — stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and abolition, the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights Movements, earth justice, and her own life as an African-American woman. She lives part-time in Ghana and performs with her band Matie Masie (“I listen, I understand”), setting stories to original music rooted in African American traditions. Her play “DOORS” was staged by Syracuse’s Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company, and her writing appears in several published anthologies. She teaches storytelling and fiber arts from African and Diasporic cultures in the Syracuse area.

Spoken Word Poetry

Sundiata Salaam

“Breath” & “I Travelled to the Soul Plane Once”

Read Bio

Sundiata Salaam-Bey, founder of Ubuntu Leaders Institute, has dedicated his career to human development and human rights. While completing a Master’s in Pan-African Studies at Syracuse University, he began teaching students the Autobiography of Malcolm X, an experience that shaped his path into education — first as an 8th grade ELA teacher, then as founding Dean of Students and later Head of School at Freedom Prep in Memphis, and eventually Chief Schools Officer and Chief People Officer, leading leadership development and talent strategy. He now serves as Associate Vice President of Innovative Schools at RedefineEd, and through Ubuntu Leaders Institute coaches leaders toward their highest selves. He holds a bachelor’s in English from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a master’s in Pan African Studies from Syracuse University.

Spoken Word Poetry

Aziyanna Chavis

“Geveneration” & “ProfiTess”

Read Bio

Aziyanna Chavis, known as AZ, is a Syracuse-born poet, multidisciplinary artist, and cultural event curator. Working across poetry, photography, and music, she builds immersive experiences centered on passion, empathy, and storytelling — vivid visuals that resonate with audiences. Her work often blends these disciplines into a single artistic expression, bringing communities together while honoring the legacy of her ancestors. Her curatorial work extends her artistic practice into public cultural spaces across Central New York, giving other local artists a platform alongside her own.

Spoken Word Poetry

Ricky "Randum Poet" Mayweather

“Black” & “My Neighborhood Garden”

Read Bio

Ricky “Randum Poet” Mayweather is a spoken-word artist from Syracuse, NY, who has been igniting audiences since 2012 with thought-provoking alliteration and animated wordplay. His performances range from shedding light on grave issues to warm-hearted humor, often within the same piece — a “Randum Poet” approach that turns out to be anything but random, built instead on close attention to language, rhythm, and the room he’s performing in.

Call & Response

Tasneem Ansariyah Grace

“Too Much Noise”

Read Bio

Tasneem Ansariyah Grace, vice president of Mosaic Changemakers, is a writer, humanities scholar, and performance artist who designs experiences exploring our collective humanity. For nearly twenty years she worked as a newspaper journalist and has partnered with nonprofits in Syracuse, NY, Nashville, TN, and Belize as a community engagement manager, content creator, and editor. At Mosaic Changemakers, she co-leads interactive seminars on identity, race, personal responsibility, and community consciousness, and co-hosts the podcast Truth B Told. She holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Syracuse University and a master’s in civic leadership from Lipscomb University. She is the founder of SoulStory, sharing global folktales with audiences, and the mother of five daughters.

Taken together, these five performances did the thing the Foundation built The Day of Orature to do: treat Orature not as a museum piece but as a living practice — a story from Botswana, a prayer spoken in Arabic, a claim of Cherokee and African inheritance, a Syracuse block remembered as sacred ground, and a folktale about learning to hear what was in front of you all along. None of it needed a page to hold it. It needed a stage, a microphone, and a community willing to listen — which is, in the end, the Foundation’s mission in a single afternoon.

Our Keynote Performer

Jackie Grace

"The Frog Who Wanted to Be a Singer," shared in the Call & Response tradition

Jackie Grace closed the performance program the way griots have always closed a gathering — not with a moral stated outright, but with a story the room has to arrive at together. “The Frog Who Wanted to Be a Singer” is a West African folktale built on a deceptively simple premise: a frog named Bubba wants to sing in a forest where only the birds are allowed to. He is mocked by his friends, turned away by the birds, and set up to fail by a fox who books him for a joke rather than a performance. Told in the Call & Response tradition, the piece asks the entire audience to help complete it — which, for a story about being shut out of the room, is the point.

A West African Folktale of Vision and Community

By the time Bubba took the mic and refused to stop, Grace had the entire square doing the telling with her — elephants stomping, snakes hissing, birds tweeting, an entire forest built section by section out of Clinton Square’s own voice, call and response. What started as a story about being denied a stage became proof that everyone eventually gets pulled into one. For a festival built to insist that Orature belongs to everyone who carries it forward — griot and grandchild alike — there was no more fitting way to close the performance program than watching an audience become the very chorus the story was about.

Read Jackie Grace's Bio

By God’s Grace, Jackie Grace was born well over a half century ago in a rural, close-knit, segregated community in Pike Road, Alabama. Though very poor, she affirms that her experiences there taught her the values and principles that guide her life today. Jackie and her late husband Ted founded and operated Grace Children’s Academy, one of the largest preschools in Central New York, with a curriculum built for the growth and development of African American children; it thrived for eighteen years. She also taught in Syracuse public schools and retired as an elementary school principal in 2017, later returning to her roots in the South and settling in Nashville. Jackie has written five children’s books featuring her characters Lizzie Mae and Leeroy, and works today as a professional storyteller, educational consultant, and motivational speaker. She is the proud mother of five, grandmother of sixteen, and great-grandmother of two.

Our Judges

Adjudicating the Inaugural Youth Showcase

Each judge brought a different lens to a panel that needed several. Joann Yarrow spent three decades directing bilingual and multicultural theater, so she was listening for how a young performer commands a stage, not just a page. Michelle Cronin, an Onondaga Nation Turtle Clan citizen and children’s author, was listening for whose stories get told and how — the same question that drives her own writing. And Dahkil Hausif, a Griot in his own right who was mentored by Professor Mũgo herself at Syracuse University, was listening for something harder to name: whether a young storyteller understood the weight of what they were carrying. Between the three of them, the youth performers were heard, not just scored.

Joann Yarrow

Joann Maria Yarrow is a director and producer with more than 35 years of experience in story development across platforms. She currently serves as Director of Community Engagement at Syracuse Stage, where she curates community dialogues connected to the theater’s productions, including a recent collaboration with community members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy nations. She previously spent twelve years as Artistic Director of Teatro Prometeo, the only Spanish-language theater conservatory and repertory company in the U.S., directing and producing more than eighty productions, and worked for three years with Broadway director Hal Prince on productions including Phantom of the Opera and Show Boat. She holds a BFA from Boston University and an MFA in Directing from UC Irvine, and is a passionate advocate for multicultural, multilingual storytelling.

Dahkil Hausif

Dahkil Hausif is a Griot, film editor, and creative technologist whose storytelling foundation was shaped at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School — under the direct mentorship of Professor Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo herself, who challenged him to treat editing as cultural expression and truth-telling, not just craft. Over more than two decades, he has edited for ESPN, Beats by Dre, Mastercard, and Ulta, co-founded Sunshowah Films, and directed the HBO-licensed documentary short Shades of Brooklyn. He is a co-founder of Men at Work Healing and a certified sociocracy consultant, work he now describes as braiding legacy, healing, and harmony into collective life. His presence on the judging panel closed a circle: a mentee of Professor Mũgo’s, returning to help adjudicate a festival built in her honor.

Michelle Cronin

Michelle Cronin is a Native American author from the Onondaga Nation, an enrolled member and proud citizen of the Turtle Clan, born and raised at Onondaga. She writes picture books, middle grade novels, and young adult fiction, driven by a lifelong recognition of the lack of Native American voices in literature — a gap she works to close with contemporary stories that let Native readers, especially children, see themselves authentically represented. She holds a BA in English and Communications from Le Moyne College, and spent fifteen years working for the Onondaga Nation and eleven years in banking in Las Vegas and Syracuse before turning fully to writing.

Adjudication & Awards

The Youth Awards

2nd Runner-Up$200

La Casita Banda — "Guantanamera"

La Casita Banda — “Guantanamera” Awarded cash prize and a Foundation plaque for the Song-Based Narrative performance.

1st Runner-Up$300

Lianna Perez-Sedkyh — "Have a Good Life"

Awarded cash prize and a Foundation plaque for the Oral Storytelling performance.

Grand Prize$500 - Tied

The Sol Salahou Prize for Outstanding Orature

Karla Lima – "Nunca me Olvides" and Angelina Marte – "Have a Great Life"

Named in honor of Sol Salahou, the community member whose extraordinary efforts were instrumental in planning this event. After a tiebreak, the inaugural grand prize was jointly awarded to two Oral Storytelling performances: Karla Lima’s “Nunca me Olvides” and Angelina Marte’s “Have a Great Life.”

Watch: Moments from the Day

A highlights reel from the festival. Additional post-production media content still to come.

In Photos

An assembly of images captured throughout the event.

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