Back and Song was a meditative four-channel film and art installation by filmmakers Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, produced by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. This kaleidoscopic installation reflected on the manner in which health and wellness are part and parcel of the American black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considered the labor and care provided by generations of black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides—and their histories of contribution to, and resistance of, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine.
Working with archivists from around the world, Moorhead and Young synthesized photographs of quotidian black family life into a time-based archive of expression. Paired with new footage, these archival compilations emphasized forms of movement, rest, and ecstatic experience from across the African diaspora as crucial modes of healing and attunement to the body. Across four film channels, music, movement, sound therapy, ritual dance, rest, and meditation were brought together, presented as a spectrum of individual and communal pursuits of well-being. Cumulatively, these archival compilations demonstrated the complexity and interconnectedness of different modes of healing, and how the pursuit of health is at the root of how life, breath, joy and pain manifest in the black experience.
Back and Song was presented at Girard College, originally chartered in 1833 as a school for “white, male orphans” and later a pivotal site in the movement to legally desegregate all Philadelphia schools. Filling its central auditorium with sound and moving image, Back and Song transformed the Chapel at Girard College into a space of rejuvenation.
