Be Holding

BE HOLDING is a large scale performance created by poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, New Music Ensemble Yarn/Wire, and director/artist Brooke O’Harra.

This dynamic collective of artists will draw from Ross Gay’s long poem Be Holding as the libretto for a large-scale performance, which premiered at Girard College in Philadelphia 2023. The project is being reimagined with Ross Gay as lead performer for a world premiere in May 2026 as part of the opening weekend of the Carnegie International.

The creative process for the piece will engage the high students from the Pittsburgh public schools as performers and technical support. Support for Be Holding is provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, The Carnegie International, the Pittsburgh area YMCAs and the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama.

“It has occurred to me, with much sorrow (though I’m getting over it), that not everyone knows who Dr. J (Julius Erving) is. I have learned this over the years, as I was trying to write this poem and would occasionally be talking to an audience that consisted, at least in part, of, shall we say, millennials, about what I was working on. “Oh,” I’d say vaguely, “I’m working on a poem about Dr. J.” In these encounters I realized that many of these otherwise decent people had never heard of The Doctor (though LeBron James, et a few al, they had all mostly at least heard of).

This strikes me as a generational ignorance, not a moral one, and for that reason I begrudge these people (or you, if you are one of them) not at all, for I have never read Harry Potter, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. And feel at least in the realm of being a decent person.” -Ross Gay

“In moving passages about his own loving but economically hard-pressed upbringing in a biracial family, Gay poses the living breath of memory against the dispiriting “museum of pain.” More broadly, like those photographic subjects who seem to look back and beyond the lookers who threaten to fix them for their own purposes, readers are invited to participate in a more humanizing communal vision. No less than the poet, and along with Dr. J, getting to his feet again after his flight from fallenness, we can experience a “beholding” both generous and reciprocal…“

– Kenyon Review (Kevin O’Connor)

Be Holding is a moving and visceral poem that speaks to the urgencies of this moment. Gay describes it as a poem “a poem that meditates, very slowly, on this tiny, impossibly beautiful moment of black flight, black genius, black beauty—and the meditation maybe is a specific mode of intentional looking (and wondering) in the midst of or as an alternative to what might be common ways of looking at, imagining, confining, black life. I guess I’m wondering about the common violence involved in looking at black people, the commodification of that violent looking, and, truly and deeply and aspirationally I’m wondering about the ways we might look tenderly and lovingly at one another, how we hold one another, how we might be holding one another, how we are beholden to one another. That, I think, is the poem’s question. Among a few other things! The poem’s in conversation with (beholden to) not only the Dr. J move, but also the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Christina Sharpe, Kevin Quashie, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Aracelis Girmay, Patrick Rosal, Amiri Baraka, Allen Iverson, and definitely lots (and lots) of other people.”

Sorey who is known for his epic and transformative percussion and composition work is the ideal collaborator to work with and inside of Gay’s epic poem.

This performance of Ross Gay’s poem is scored and conducted by Tyshawn Sorey for improvisation by the ensemble Yarn/Wire. Directed by Brooke O’Harra. The text is performed by Ross Gay along with poets Yolanda Wisher and David Gaines accompanied by a three-channel video installation designed by Catching on Thieves and Matt Deinhart. Lighting is by Itohan Edoloyi. Sound design by Eugene Lew. Stage Manager is Miranda Watkins.

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