On February 22, JazzAntiqua Dance & Music Ensemble presented The Stories We Tell at the Silver Screen Theater at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, in celebration of Black History Month.
Blending jazz music, dance, spoken word, film, and visual art, the performance created an intimate, multi-disciplinary exploration of lived experience, collective memory, and cultural legacy. Founded in 1993 by choreographer Pat Taylor, JazzAntiqua draws on the improvisational and narrative traditions embedded in jazz — traditions that center on resilience, creativity, and community voice.
Jazz, at its core, is a form of storytelling. It is intimate and responsive, rooted in both memory and innovation. In The Stories We Tell, performers transformed the stage into a space where history was not recited, but embodied. Through movement and sound, audiences encountered expressions of Black joy alongside reflections on struggle, migration, belonging, and identity.
JazzAntiqua’s intimate jazz-theater experience
JazzAntiqua’s intimate jazz-theater experience
JazzAntiqua’s intimate jazz-theater experience
The program’s layered structure — weaving together dance artists, poets, musicians, and visual artists — reinforced the idea that cultural memory is never singular. It is collective, collaborative, and continually reinterpreted.
Presented in association with the City of West Hollywood, the event invited audiences to reflect together during Black History Month. At a time when public conversations about race, history, and belonging remain urgent, artistic expression becomes a powerful civic tool.
The humanities are not confined to books or lecture halls. They live in performance spaces, in music that carries ancestral memory, and in choreography that translates experience into movement. JazzAntiqua’s work reminds us that storytelling is also something we feel — and that collective cultural expression can foster deeper understanding across communities.
California Humanities is proud to support projects that illuminate history through creative practice. By honoring jazz as both an art form and a historical archive, JazzAntiqua expands how audiences engage with the humanities.
The stories we tell — and how we tell them — shape how communities understand themselves. Through performance, The Stories We Tell demonstrated that memory, joy, and artistic expression remain essential to a vibrant civic culture.
