Redemption Ritual is produced by Jah Kente International ® as a choreo-poetic presentation of classical poems by leading African American poets during Harlem Renaissance Era, such as: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson and Sterling A. Brown. It is a vivid and compelling depiction of common aspects of African American life from captivity, middle passage, to lived experiences.
Students learn how to use the elements of theatrical expression to create drama, as well as original dramas on stage. Students learn how to acquire and use 21st century skills such as creativity, imagination, problem solving, media literacy, IT literacy, cross cultural learning and structure, by exercising key characteristics and habits of the mind, including but not limited to soft skills such as: compare and contrast, variety of expression, questioning, abstract and concrete thinking, applying prior and newly acquired knowledge, making predictions, creating new productions, designing, analyzing, word structure, collaborative actions, sequencing and imagery.
During the Great Migration over 175,000 African Americans moved to Harlem that had become a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation and key to artistic revolution and authentic expression in an extraordinarily diverse black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority.
While not confined to the Harlem district of New York City , the Harlem neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan was considered the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities, where they had their own intellectual circles, discussion groups, and theaters, also converged in Harlem or resettled there.
Harlem was considered the “Negro Mecca” during the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the " New Negro Movement, " which blossomed from 1918- 1937 as an intellectual, social, literary, and artistic expression that included literature, music, theatre and visual arts. The range of interests and expressions aimed to re-conceptualize “the Negro” and away from white thoughts that engineered relationships among black people regarding their heritage. All these produced intense debates with enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide.
From the 1930-1950s, French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris protested French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation. Their works influenced the African Renaissance with the Négritude Movement as a framework of critique and literary theory that promoted African consciousness.
