The American Slavery Project

The American Slavery Project (ASP) is a theatrical response to erasure and revisionism in American discourse about enslavement and its aftermath. This chapter describes the impetus, research methods, and processes of creating Unheard Voices , ASP's first original professional, commissioned performance piece that later became a collaborative theatre-making model with ASP's High School and Community Writers Labs. Unheard Voices is a collectively written performance piece and ritual with West African singing, dancing, and drumming. Part monologue play, part concert, part interactive ritual, it is an homage to the ancestors based on some of the nearly 30,000 bodies of African-descended people buried between 1790 and 1890 in what is now known as the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. The site was rediscovered in the mid-1990s when excavation for a federal office building unearthed 419 bodies. ASP commissioned seventeen playwrights to write fictional monologues based on archival research on colonial New York and the contents of individual graves. Students in ASP's High School and Community Labs undertake the same research and activities to create their own version of Unheard Voices , which the students or professional actors then perform. The authors encourage readers to adapt ASP's methods to fulfill their state's educational standards.