La Cieba presents “Mother May” and The Divine Feminine with Ghanaian Artist/Herbalist Ria Boss Live! on Thursdays in May
For May 2020 La Ceiba Festival has put together a series of events that engage the ongoing global struggle for liberation and re-alignment with the Divine Feminine. Ria Boss is a Ghanaian Creative and Healer that is at the center of the festival’s “Mother May” series for three consecutive Thursdays this month.
The first Thursday session, “The Women: A Conversation of Multimedia Innovators”, featured a variety of perspectives on the emerging markets and opportunities that are being captured by women of the Diaspora. You can check out that conversation and capture all of its jewels below.
Ria Boss will be performing songs from her catalog on 21 May at 6pm EST / 10pm GMT for the second installation of her Divine Feminine series. She released a new single “Call Up” earlier this year and has a variety of different projects available on her Bandcamp page. For her final engagement of the month on 28 May, Ria will be conducting a songwriting workshop via Zoom that will surely be informative while allowing participants to ask questions and gain insights into her creative process.
As an Artist and Contributor to programming around La Ceiba Festival, I was given the privilege of creating one of my playcasts to celebrate the Divine essence running through the festival, with Ria Boss as the centerpiece. If you are not familiar with the concept of a playcast it is a unique blend of a curated playlist of music combined with a narrative context piece of 300-400 words that adds additional reference to the connections between the selected tracks and the subject material. In this case, the Trees of Life playcast engages with the enduring and emerging voices of resilience presented by the women of the Diaspora.
There is power in culture. Seemingly endless reserves of strength and resilience have been at the heart of the African experience for generations and have been expressed most vividly through the music and arts produced by the children of the Diaspora. However, the inherent artistic freedoms that should be free for all to enjoy have endured ongoing manipulation by various iterations of patriarchy that use force and manipulation to silence both the spiritual presence and literal voices of the feminine divine.
Gatherings of women, whether in the red tent, the warriors den, or the spaces in between have had their own purpose and definition outside of the context of men, while simultaneously often being in direct defiance of laws and traditions that oppress. Within indigenous populations of the Americas and West Africa, La Ceiba is a sacred tree that provides spiritually healing powers. By engaging that traditional essence in the form of multi-talented Ghanaian Creative Healer Ria Boss, music and art are being centered under the festival tree and bringing elements of the Divine Feminine back to the forefront of our collective consciousness.
As a collection of audio tracks, the Trees of Life playcast provides a cross-section of progressive sounds that are at the edge of expressing divinity through song. As a collection of artists, the women featured in this playcast represent the broad dynamic of resilience within sonic creations being manifest across the Diaspora. From Koffee in Jamaica to Angelica Garcia in Richmond to Ibeyi in Paris, the feminine divine is captured in a musical framework that reflects the global realignment that is taking place with women wielding audio art as their weapons against patriarchial oppression. Ria Boss will be broadcasting live from Ghana every Thursday during “Mother May” for La Ceiba Festival, leading the charge by fueling the flames and breathing life into the rising tide of the feminine aesthetic.
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