THIS: Meditation on Love, Loss, Lunacy, and Laughter in the early 21st century. THIS is an evening of experiential encounters that invite audiences to celebrate, question, and reflect on the real and unimaginable of living life in the contemporary moment. Through vignettes, the live original music of bassist and percussionist Ron Reid, and the dance, prose, song making, and soundscape by Carol Marie Webster, audiences engage with the radical, the serendipitous, and the quirky.

Carol Marie Webster, PhD is a multidisciplinary dance artist and scholar deeply committed to anti-oppression and antiracist art-making, research, community building, and activism. Her works center on vulnerable populations and on human vulnerability, exploring notions of identity and belonging, resistance, and the cultivation of joy and dignity. In her dance career, Webster danced such noteworthy companies as Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Forces of Nature, and Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, to name a few. As a theatre/dance-maker, master teacher, and community builder, Webster works nationally and internationally, including Belgium, Greece, Jamaica, Spain, United Kingdom (UK), and the United States. In 2013, Dr. Webster was awarded a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Cultural Engagement Fellow at the University of Oxford. In 2017 she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Religion and in the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University. Webster holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Leeds in the UK

Ron Reid is a multi-instrumental artist with an overwhelming passion for creating improvised music that celebrates his rich Caribbean heritage. He is also a Professor of Contemporary Writing and Production at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA.

This Trinidad-born bassist, steel drummer, composer/educator has for the past 30 years been a standard-bearer for improvisational Caribbean music.

Ron began his career as a bassist in the late Lord Kitchener’s Calypso Revue Tent in 1978 and has recorded, performed and toured with an honor roll of calypso, soca and afro–caribbean pop artistes including Lord Relator, Lord Superior, Mighty Sparrow, Shadow, Might Terror, Ras Shorty I, David Rudder, Ella Andall and Andre Tanker.

Ron has composed music for several television programs in Trinidad and Tobago including Who the Cap Fits, Morral, Epiphany, Caribbean Eye, The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon and Gayelle. He has also been Musical Director for the Trinidad Theatre’
Workshop’s productions of Nobel Prize playwright Derek Walcott’s Joker of Seville, Dream on Monkey Mountain and the premiere production of Steel at the Hasty Pudding and Huntington Theatres in Boston, MA.

His steelpan infused sextet Sunsteel performs an eclectic mix of Trinidadian folk, afro-Caribbean and jazz compositions. Ron has shared his steel pan talents with Kalabash of Toronto, Dave Samuels’ Caribbean Jazz Project and David Williams’ J’Ouvert. Ron has recorded Calypsoldier, Reid, Wright and be Happy and most recently Precious Metals as a leader. He has performed and recorded as a sideman with a host of artists including, Randy Weston, Carmen Lundy, Vanessa Rubin, Grace Kelly, Bill Harley, Antonio Hart, Vincent Herring, Gabrielle Goodman Othello Molineaux, the Imagine Orchestra and most recently the new pan-caribbean ensemble Caribbo.

As an educator, Ron has presented workshops and clinics on steelpan and Caribbean music at high schools and colleges around the US. He teaches arranging, ensemble, steelpan performance techniques and the history of music in the English-speaking Caribbean at Berklee College of Music. His performing ensembles include the Precious Metals Project, Sunsteel and the Liberty Quintet.