8 pm, Bowker Auditorium

Developed last year in New WORLD Theater's innovative New Works for a New World Play Laboratory, Sekou Sundiata's blessing the boats returns to the Pioneer Valley for a highly anticipated engagement. This poignant one-person theatrical work brings into perspective the story of five tumultuous years of Sundiata's life, his struggle with life-threatening kidney failure, his subsequent organ transplant and recovery. More profoundly, it is a personal look at the world from a forced withdrawal, "an exile from the self I had come to know." blessing the boats blends solo theatrical performance, literary reading, stand-up comedy, spoken word performance and the storytelling of a griot.