Vacant Lots
Presented by Billy Mark, Bill Harris, Marion Hayden, and Arise Rock WORK IN PROGRESS
Vacant Lots is an app-based sound map story for the North End and Piety Hill neighborhoods. Utilizing narrative, music, and field recordings, the app provides users with a sequential experience as they walk from place to place, exploring what has changed and what has stayed the same, the neighborhoods’ generational and geographic divisions, and its various other fault lines.
The text for one sound map will be created by Bill Harris, set east of Woodward in the North End neighborhood, and told through the eyes of young people. This story will be condensed and adapted for the sound map and set to jazz music created by Marion Hayden. On the west side of Woodward, a similar sound map will be set. Here, the music and narrative will be created by Arise Rock and other high schoolers from the neighborhood.
Audiences will walk through the shifting landscape of these two neighborhoods listening to invisible voices set in vacant lots, hearing stories from elders as they describe their youth and voices of youth as they describe and make sense of the world around them. These divergent and overlapping stories will offer a space to meditate on the nature of place, belonging, and community.
About the Artists
Billy Mark is a multi-disciplinary poet that has worked in poetry, composition, theater, and performance art. He attended California Institute of the Arts and has received awards like the Los Angeles Black Music Award for Best Spoken Word.
Bill Harris is a Wayne State University emeritus professor of English. He is a creative writer and arts critic. He formerly served as artistic coordinator at both JazzMobile and the New Federal Theatre in New York and was Chief Curator at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. His plays have received over a hundred productions nationwide.
Marion Hayden is one of the nation’s finest proponents of the acoustic bass. Steeped in the jazz tradition and mentored by Detroit’s jazz royalty—trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, pianist and composer Kenn Cox, and saxophonists Wendell Harrison, Donald Walden, and Charles Gabriel—she has performed with such luminaries as Geri Allen, Bobby McFerrin, Regina Carter, Steve Turre, and Nancy Wilson, and is co-founder of the groundbreaking women-led jazz ensemble Straight Ahead.
Arise Rock is a freshman attending Detroit School of the Arts. She majors in theater and is a member of the Thespian Honors Society. Rock is also the author of The Trail to Home, a free-verse novel that she self-published. She also writes fiction and fantasy novels.