brittany j. green

dream for you

An Experiment in Voices

(2026)

aracelis girmay, poet

Ashleigh Gordon, viola

brittany j. green, composition and sound design

Duration: 45’

Adapted from its 2025 debut at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts (then titled An Experiment in Voices), and featuring new texts and projections, aracelis girmay’s dream for you incorporates original writing, close readings, and sound to meditate on Black maternity and intergenerational imagination. Beginning with the life of her great-grandmother, who was born to Black farm laborers in Georgia around 1909 and later migrated to Chicago, girmay has created a hybrid, performative essay focused on the histories and sensibilities of her foremothers while also contending with familial legacies of loss and displacement. This piece, developed in collaboration with producer Bernard Schwartz, composer brittany j. green, and violist Ashleigh Gordon, and director Dawn M. Simmons, emerges from an extended study of works by caretakers, cultural workers, artists, and scholars that are, in girmay’s words, “attending to the imagination—and to lifemaking—in catastrophe.