Performance Dates & Times
Friday, November 20 at 7:30pm

Saturday, November 21 7:30pm

Sunday, November 22 7:30pm

cara hagan

MINE TO KEEP

Created by Cara Hagan

Mine to Keep is a folk-horror performance rooted in Black American storytelling traditions and the enduring, shape-shifting life of folklore. Drawing from “The Headless Haint” and “The Golden Arm,” the work brings two tales of restless spirits, stolen bodies, desire, and possession into conversation with histories of Black labor, bodily autonomy, and the struggle to belong wholly to oneself.

At the center of Mine to Keep is a question: What does it mean to possess something—or someone—in a world shaped by histories in which Black bodies and labor have been treated as property? The work considers ownership not only as a material condition, but as something that reaches into intimacy, safety, memory, inheritance, and spiritual life. Haunting becomes a way of asking what remains unresolved, what refuses to disappear, and what might return to demand recognition.

Blending movement, text, puppetry, object theatre, sound, and ritual, Mine to Keep is guided by a large articulated Griot puppet—a storyteller, witness, and keeper of memory who moves between worlds. Through horror, humor, transformation, and embodied storytelling, the work treats folklore as a living archive: carried through bodies, altered through retelling, and made new each time a story changes hands.

CAST
Cara Hagan - The Griot
Amen Igbinosun - The Headless Haint
Elinor Klebber Diggs - Aurelie
Maurice Ivy - Will

CREATIVE TEAM
Rodrigo Pocidonio Silva - Scenic Design, Dramaturgy
Dani Draper - Lighting Design
Ariel Pellman - Costume Design

About the Artist

CARA HAGAN

Cara Hagan is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, and cultural worker who makes things that move, haunt, remember, and occasionally misbehave. Working across dance, theatre, film, puppetry, performance art, and ritual, she describes herself as an artist in disciplinary flux—less interested in defending the borders between forms than in discovering what becomes possible when those borders collapse.

Her work is populated by unruly bodies, ancestral echoes, strange objects, damaged landscapes, ghosts, soil, water, and other more-than-human collaborators. Drawing from Black feminist thought, Black diasporic storytelling, experimental performance, and filmmaking traditions, Hagan explores questions of bodily and spiritual autonomy, ecological interdependence, memory, grief, and belonging. She approaches artmaking as a form of world-building: a place where the laws governing bodies, time, value, and possibility can be temporarily rewritten.

Hagan’s films and performances have traveled nationally and internationally, and her writing spans scholarly and arts publications. She is the author of Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice, Executive Director of Dance on Camera, and an Associate Professor at The New School.