Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Rock Me Mama, a new musical by Karen Hartman, takes place in a 1960’s pre-Roe America, and deals largely with a woman’s right to choose, while forewarning the horrors of a world post-Roe. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling, it’s painful how vital and relevant this piece is now, in November 2022. Rock Me Mama’s story is one that will touch women of all demographics – it shows the challenges of being a young woman, faced with the hardest decision a woman might encounter, the consequences of being disowned from one’s home, and losing everything one’s ever known.
Rock Me Mama pushes the possibilities of musical theater by utilizing a wide range of musical genres, including opera, classical music, 1970’s rock, doo-wop, 60’s pop, and jazz. Through Rock Me Mama and subsequent projects, we hope to create a space for intergenerational conversations about reproductive rights and the difficult decisions women in our culture have made and kept secret for so long. We hope our work will be healing for those who have experienced and continue to experience such hardships. We believe that the humanity and truth behind Rock Me Mama’s story will allow for connection across seemingly great divides.
Through an existing collaboration with the National Institute for Reproductive Health and fiscal sponsorship agreement with New York Live Arts, Rock Me Mama will be incorporated into a co-fundraising concert event with NIRH on the would-be 50th anniversary of Roe’s passing in January 2023, to raise critical awareness around women’s reproductive rights and expand access to information around a woman’s options when encountering pregnancy, including legal and safe abortion. Karen Hartman, our show’s creator, is developing a concert version, with narration, of the two-act musical production of Rock Me Mama for use in this collaboration, with projected completion by late 2022.
We expect to use this concert version to promote and find potential funders for a late spring 2023 workshop production of Rock Me Mama. We also hope to use both our full production draft and the concert version of Rock Me Mama to tour and perform in states with limited-to-no access to abortion, and increase exposure to this critical work.
As of December 15th, this project has raised $8,500 of their $10,000 goal. This project has 22 days left to raise the $10,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $30, you will get one postcard. For a pledge of $75, you will get digital music downloads. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rockmemama/rock-me-mama-a-new-musical?
