Words, music, and more combine to tell overlooked stories of women of color in Boston

Boston Globe

15-05-2025

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The presentation was part of
Narratives of Women of Color in Greater Boston
, a new performance series that aims to reintroduce these kinds of rich but overlooked narratives with original compositions. These new works, many of which fuse music, dance, video, or poetry, are based on historical documents about women of color in Boston, ranging from decades-old archival interviews to contemporary poetry and manuscripts submitted by community members.
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The April event launched the series with programming that was primarily inspired by the
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The series is the initiative of
Qin cites community engagement as a key component of her artistic practice, and decided to dig deeper into the history of neighborhoods across her new-ish home last fall. She launched an open call for materials preserving the experiences of Boston-based women of color, requesting text-based documents like letters, poetry, and manuscripts.
She ultimately received 'eye-opening' submissions from residents of Roxbury, Dorchester, Cambridge, Brookline, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, and the Fenway, touching on topics such as life as a Black disabled woman and the city's desegregation busing crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. Combined with the interviews from the oral history project, the wealth of perspectives would serve as the inspiration for the series's six composers:
'
I wanted to really go into those histories, see what actually happened and what I didn't know, and what I could create from those unknown things,' Qin says.
Guests at Tuesday's event in Roxbury can expect to hear five of the eight new compositions created for the series, including a work by Qin that was inspired by 'Present/Presence,' a poem from Boston disability advocate and author Heather Watkins. Another event in the series, scheduled for May 31, will move the experience outdoors to the Little Free Library at the Rose Kennedy Greenway and unveil two previously-unheard compositions created for the series.
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Qin says she hopes the multimedia nature of the performances will pique guest's interests in the materials that inspired each event, as well as the careers and backgrounds of the composers themselves.
'Even if it's just one phrase or one note, if that moment really speaks to them, I think it could start a new journey for them,' she says.
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