REHEARSING JUSTICE

Rehearsing Justice is a one-woman show that follows the journey of a time-traveling Ida B. Wells embarking on an anti-lynching crusade of the 21st century. After being invoked into the future by the cries of today, Ida endeavors on an investigative mission of police brutality, as she did with lynchings in the 1900s; coming in contact with some of the most transformative figures and moments in the Black Lives Matter Movement along the way. Rehearsing Justice, both a historical and afro-futuristic crusade, uses verbatim testimony, imagined realities, and gallows humor to interrogate the phrase “modern-day lynchings” and disrupt the exhausting cyclical pattern of state-sanctioned violence. Conceptualized, written, and performed by Andrea Ambam, Rehearsing Justice is an immersive theatrical and transmedia storytelling experience, exploring the technology of social justice through a collage and collide of time. In this virtual iteration of a work-in-progress, Andrea converges sci-fi and social commentary through the one and only, Ida B. Wells.

MEET THE ARTIST:

Andrea Ambam is a Brooklyn-based artist, actress, and playwright, whose roots sprout from Cameroon. As a politically engaged storyteller who believes in the art’s potential for movement building and transformative justice, Andrea best intersects spaces where community, performance, and truth-telling pulsate. She has developed her practice as an Artist-in-Residence for Anna Deavere Smith, an EmergeNYC fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and as a competitive public speaker where she has been awarded 10 national championships, "Top Speaker in the Nation'' three times, and gone on to debate conservative pundits on live TV. As a performer, writer, and facilitator, she’s worked with Classical Theatre of Harlem, Playbill, gal-dem, Abrons Arts Center, NYU Prison Education Program, NYU Verbatim Performance Lab, Artists’ Literacies Institute, Centre for Social Innovation, and others. Recent acting credits include: Making Gay History: Before Stonewall (Provincetown Playhouse); Re-Writing the Declaration (Free Street Theater). Andrea holds a Master’s degree in Art & Public Policy from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. www.andreaambam.com