Documentary films have been used for decades to inform the masses about social issues. These films provide a unique medium that sends messages to audiences and evokes emotions that encourage viewers to gain or increase agency and take action to improve environments and settings around them. In recent years, the prevalence of documentaries on streaming services has brought the stories of sexual abusers into greater focus, and the ways that voices and music are utilized in these films plays an essential role in how audiences receive and understand messages. This paper analyzes how documentary sound influences emotions and mental investment by dissecting the various uses of sound in the Surviving R. Kelly documentary series (2019) which centers on the mental, emotional, financial, physical, and sexual abuse and assault of underage and adult women of color. This research delves into how feminist theories and feminist social movements worked jointly to protest sexual assault and the general oppression of women of color. Drawing on analyses of survivors whose testimonials were featured in the documentary, this paper highlights the complex ways that the intersectionality of race, gender, and class contributed to a culture of sexual abuse in R. Kelly’s musical sphere.

Phoenix Fire was originally conceived as a work of intercultural theater, drawing on the poetic and musical structures of Japanese noh to tell the story of the failed 1940 and successful 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Phoenix Fire was also intended as an exercise in cultural diplomacy in support of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, with performances planned in Tokyo and sister cities San Antonio and Kumamoto. Performers included members of international performing ensemble Theatre Nohgaku, featuring veteran Kita school shitekata Matsui Akira, and students from writer-composer Kevin Salfen's home institution, the University of the Incarnate Word. When the COVID-19 pandemic made the 2020 premiere impossible, Salfen and members of Theatre Nohgaku reimagined the work as a film, retaining much of the text and music of the original theater work. The resulting film is a novel combination of one of the world's oldest continually performed theater traditions, noh, and contemporary film techniques.

This proposal is for an introduction and screening of the concluding nochiba, or "second act," of Phoenix Fire (2025), an enapsulation of the 1964 Games as filmed by Kon Ichikawa for the documentary Tokyo Olympiad. It features conventional noh dance as well as a dance newly choreographed by Matsui Akira and Jubilith Moore. Its score combines the traditional hayashi, or instrumental ensemble, of noh with English-language utai, or chant, and contemporary concert music, a musical encoding of the cultural intermixture of the 1964 Games and of the Olympics more broadly. Duration: 12'30". In English, subtitled in Japanese or English.