The young women from Youth Options Unlimited had never performed, let alone danced, in front of a crowd before. Yet they found themselves at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury, set to perform a number built on their experiences living in Boston.

 

For the previous five days the young women had practiced their performance in collaboration with a traveling research residency called “My City, My Body: or if Concrete Could Talk, or for those that might be traumatized.”

 

With the guidance of Destiny Polk, founder of the art-activist platform Radical Black Girl, the participants wrote poems, discussed their stories, and vented about problems impacting both Boston and themselves.

 

“Destiny’s project … gives young females opportunity to explore, and address their experiences as black and brown girls in Boston while developing their muscle of communication and self-advocacy in a deep and protracted way,” D. Farai Williams, the artistic director of Madison Park Development Corporation, told DigBoston.

Read the entire article as it originally appeared in DigBoston here.