Original film adaptation of The Bushwick Starr’s production of ANIMAL WISDOM to be released this Spring

Photo credit: Maria Baranova

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and American Conservatory Theater have announced that they will be producing an original film adaptation of The Bushwick Starr’s critically-acclaimed 2017/18 production of Animal Wisdom.

Created by and starring Heather Christian, the film of the acclaimed musical seance is set to be released for streaming late Spring 2021. It is directed by Amber McGinnis, with stage direction by Emilyn Kowaleski, production design by Christopher Bowser, and costume design by Heather McDevitt Barton.

The cast also includes Sasha Brown, Eric Farber, B.E. Farrow and Maya Sharpe.

Do you believe in ghosts? Take a virtual front row seat whilst singer-songwriter-soothsayer Heather Christian lays to rest the souls that haunt her. Christian shapeshifts between rock star, folklorist and high priestess as she conjures a constellation of souls in an effort to confront her family’s mythologies.

With their raucous, ferocious music that fuses blues, gospel and folk, Animal Wisdom offers a transporting experience where a concert becomes a mass, and a mass becomes a séance, all in your living room.

Christian said: “At its heart, Animal Wisdom is an admission and ritualisation of grief, and an acknowledgement that we carry those that we lose with us every day. It's about the reconsecration of spaces as much as it is about the reconsecration of feelings that we all have and bury in order to get us from one day to the next.

“This has been a year of immense loss and turmoil. More than ever, I am being asked to confront those things in my day-to-day life, and I think after this year, that's a pretty universal experience. I am excited beyond measure that this piece has new utility on a much wider scale. I have reimagined Animal Wisdom as a ritual to sanctify and consecrate the spaces that we are currently stuck in: our homes, and sing out the gnarly painful bits that we have lost. We will be consecrating a theater that had remained dark for a year, and we will be consecrating your living rooms across the country in hopes that a little light can come on back in.” 

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