In collaboration with Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA, FSA was thrilled to present REVIVAL, a performance by Davóne Tines & THE TRUTH. Their extraordinary talents transformed Charleston’s historic Mother Emanuel AME Church into a space where music, sound, song, and testimony affected a sense of personal and collective renewal. Tines and his collaborators grounded the program in Mother Emanuel’s revival service tradition, drawing listeners into an intense and emotional encounter with the church community and its spiritual traditions.

Centered on the question “What needs to be revived in us?”, the program—titled REVIVAL—invites audiences into that inquiry not as observers, but as participants. Through music, text, and testimony, Tines and his collaborators open a space where listening, reflection, and presence become active forms of renewal.

Tines’s return to Mother Emanuel is both artistic and deeply personal, shaped in part through his work on Homegoing, a collaboration with filmmaker Julie Dash created in remembrance of the Emanuel Nine. This performance extends that act of remembrance into a living, communal setting. Developed in collaboration with Mother Emanuel’s extended community and historian Lee Bennett, REVIVAL draws on the traditions of the AME Church and the structure of the revival service, building on themes first explored in Tines’s Recital No. 1: MASS.

Blending music from the Black performative canon with spoken reflection and collective encounter, the program moves between meditative intensity and charged stillness—inviting each listener into attention, recognition, and release. Within the walls of Mother Emanuel, music becomes an offering: a way to honor the past, hold the present, and carry a renewed sense of spirit and shared humanity back into the world.

Produced in collaboration with Spoleto USA. Support provided by Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts and Ken Kuchin and William Morgan.

In this video excerpt, Davóne Tines & THE TRUTH perform Let it Shine, a powerfully imagined rendering of a familiar African American spiritual.