GO FORTH (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a translation into performance of six chapters from Going Forth By Day, a canon of Egyptian funerary texts, commonly known in the West as the Egyptian Book of The Dead. Originally intended to provide the deceased with a blueprint to the afterlife, Schaal excavates the spells and incantations as a performance score. GO FORTH proposes burial not as erasure but as offering restitution, creating space for the presence of the absent, the imagined, and the longed for.

The site-responsive performance premiered at Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival accompanied by a photographic installation, a series of funerary murals initiating the audience into the mythological landscape of the work. The performance then traveled to the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda, and the Cairo International and Experimental Theater Festival in Egypt.

Originally situated in the context of her own father’s death, the ritualized grieving practices of his burial, and the intimacy between black people and death globally, Schaal now places the work inside the web of thought and labor that flooded between Black people internationally in the mid 20th century, a moment when looking inward and outward at death and imperialism mobilized powerful alliances from Harlem to Cuba, Ethiopia, Senegal, Vietnam, Haiti, and Rwanda.

GO FORTH was developed in collaboration with performers Cornell Alston, Justin Hicks, April Matthis (on film), William Nadylam, Paul Pryce, Greig Sargeant, David Thomson, Ashely Vellano, Cheyanne Williams, and Courtney Williams.

This iteration of GO FORTH is made possible by a Princess Grace Foundation Special Project grant to the artist.

CAST & CREATIVE TEAM
Design by Christopher Myers
Sound by Rucyl Mills
Light by Jeanette Yew
Produced by Kiara Benn
Stage Management by Lenyn Hernandez Marcia 
Performed by Helga Davis, Okwui Okpokwasili, Kaneza Schaal, Kiara Benn

Additional Performers: April Matthis (on film), Rucyl Mills

PERFORMANCES
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 22, 2024

PHOTOS
Stephanie Berger