'Channels of Hope'

This film is part of the Weariness to the Flesh project.

What does a world where people are free look like, and how can it be achieved? In the late, longtime Asheville resident Helen Moseley-Edington's poem, "I Dream a World," which is a take on the 1941 Langston Hughes poem of the same name, she writes of the world she dreams of, one Africans knew before ships approached their shores. She asks that readers dream of this world with her. To do so, one has to have a sense of self, which is "crucial if we are to join ourselves to the past and the future, to commune with the ancestors as well as the coming children" writes Vincent Harding in There Is a River. He refers to the formerly enslaved as "human channels of hope," the ancestors Moseley-Edington asks readers to consider.

In Channels of Hope, Moseley-Edington's granddaughter, Asheville resident LaVie Danielle Montgomery, reads her grandmother's words while choreographer and dancer Alexandra Joye Warren invokes memories and ancestors through movement. Moseley-Edington knew of this world and wanted future generations to know it, too.

Runtime: 3:29 Poem: Written by Helen Moseley-Edington; performed by LaVie Danielle Montgomery
Choreography: Alexandra Joye Warren Performance coordinator: Myra Weise, Proxemic Media
Video: Filmed and edited by Julia Wall Director and producer: Michael S. Williams