Speak for Change

Please note that this show is rescheduled from February 15 2024. All tickets booked for the original date remain valid.

Thomas Sage Pedersen and Speak for Change presents Cannabis Unveiled - Cannabis in Contemporary US Culture, featuring a conversation with local Santa Cruz cannabis expert Bryce Berryessa and a music performance from vocalist Crista Berryessa.

Speak for Change presents a live music performance from local music producer, curator, and musician Summer Red followed by a discussion with Thomas Sage Pedersen on the role of music in modern culture.

Join us for a film screening of Consuela Alba's short film El Andalón / The Healer and a conversation with the filmmaker about the "Power of Storytelling." Consuelo is an award winning documentary filmmaker and Executive Director of the Watsonville Film Festival.

Due to illness, Thomas Pedersen had to cancel, but we will still host Madre Guía this evening! She will show footage from her recent project (E)cho (Q)ueue at The Lab in SF, followed by a discussion with other artists, moderated by the Black Sound Symposium's curator, Kira Dralle.

Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett) (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work emerges from a play-based movement practice within an investigative framework. As a queer, Black, Afro-Diasporic artist with roots in the Caribbean, her work is inevitably rooted in emancipatory practices. Hewett aims to deepen curiosity around the Black American experience by focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom through a variety of improvisational structures and cross-disciplinary experimentation.

Mimi Tempestt is a daughter of california. Her works are aimed at disrupting stereotypical narratives and the iconography of black and queer people in media representations. Her debut album, Rough Diamond, was released in 2019. She graduated from Mills College with a ma in literature. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misremeberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press (2020). She is currently a Doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Speak for Change was founded with the mission of creating positive and lasting social change in our local and global communities. From a studio at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, Thomas Sage Pedersen has hosted over 100 podcast episodes – and now, Speak for Change and Indexical bring you a series of live events! Each event features an interview and a musical guest, with new and custom sets tailored to the topic of conversation.

Speak for Change is back with Khafre Jay of the Oakland-based Hip Hop for Change and a live set by Lyrical I.

Kuumbwa Jazz Center & Indexical bring the highly popular Speak for Change series of live events to the Kuumbwa stage. The NYC-based duo of Darius Jones & Amirtha Kidambi opens the evening with a series of musical adaptations of cosmological writings by iconic improviser and bandleader Sun Ra. Following the live musical set, host Thomas Sage Pedersen sits down with Cat Willis—Founder of Tannery World Dance & Cultural Center, and instigator of the Black Health Matters initiative—to discuss her work and founding one of the central organizations cultivating Black culture and art in Santa Cruz.