Inspired by personal conversations with Raven Wilkinson, the first female Black ballet dancer credited with dancing for a major ballet company in the United States, RAVEN is an innovative work of dance-driven music theatre that explores the captivating trajectory of her professional life in parallel with the rise of the civil rights movement. The theatrical piece will use dance, text, and music to examine Raven’s struggle to confront what it means to define herself as an artist when the world won’t fully accept her identity, and it will investigate the impact of her story on artists that came after her.