Longing to Tell

From summer 2025

akua naru & Tyshawn Sorey, Artistic Direction
Anta Helena Recke, Director
Stephan Kondert, Bass
James Gordon Williams, piano
Josiah Woodson, multi-instrumentalist
and others
Ensemble Resonanz

»Longing to tell« – A Musical Performance on Black Female Intimacy. Spoken word, hip-hop, jazz, and contemporary ensemble music come together on one stage.

Black women tell their stories – powerful, poetic, and deeply moving. »Longing To Tell« is a full-length musical performance that centers the lived experiences of Black women: stories of love and loss, tenderness and violence, intimacy and community, resilience and empowerment.

Acclaimed U.S. artist, scholar, and activist akua naru joins forces with the Ensemble Resonanz, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey, and visionary director Anta Helena Recke to create a bold new stage production. akua naru, known for blending hip-hop and conscious rap with intellectual and political depth, brings her unique voice to a work that bridges spoken word poetry, hip-hop culture, and contemporary ensemble composition.

The piece is inspired by the groundbreaking 2003 book »Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy« by sociologist and hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose, which gathers 21 first-person narratives from Black women of diverse backgrounds and generations.

Premiering at the International Summer Festival at Kampnagel (Hamburg) in August 2025, »Longing To Tell« is now available for touring.

akua naru

»The story isn‘t alive until it is told. The music is the telling.«

Hip Hop artist akua naru undertakes a stage adaptation of Tricia Rose’s 2003 book »Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy«, a seminal work of cultural history that employed varied techniques toward »a landmark book in black letters and scholarship. For the first time, we hear the loving, bracing, hurting, humorous, wise, angry, hopeful - and above all honest - voices of black women speaking about sexuality and intimacy« (Michael Eric Dyson).

Tyshawn Sorey

»Sorey is neither ›combining‹ genres nor ›crossing over‹ from one into another. He does not so much bridge genre divides as cast them aside, as if they were a vestige of a prehistoric era, before artists as versatile as himself walked the earth.« The NY Times Magazine

Internationally acclaimed composer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey will be collaborating with akua naru and write the score. Beneath naru’s poetry and a 5-piece hip-hop band, »Longing to Tell« will use a European chamber orchestra. The resonance of the classical music tradition, historically loaded with ideas of supremacy and patriarchy, becomes a substantial factor for creating a further level of tension within the narrative between the spoken words and the musical body, thereby supporting the dialogue the piece is willing to provoke.

Anta Helena Recke

»It feels as if you’ve taken three steps back and are seeing the supposedly familiar with fresh eyes.« (Die Deutsche Bühne)

Displaying encounters, conflicts and cultural-chemical reactions on stage of what sometimes acts as Greek chorus, sometimes resembles the call and response of the Black church, other times the hip hop cypher and classical orchestra tradition, this is to be a conglomerate work in which languages, traditions and rhythms are layered with significance, and magnified by the interaction of words and music this piece underscores. The complex rendering highlights the way that Rose herself has often spoken of seeing her work adapted – that of musical performance.

»Through this braiding together, the orchestra breaks free from our traditional understandings, as they relate to power and access, and elevate to that of sonic lighthouse holding space as Black women navigate the storm.