Performing Artist at #HellaBlack Vol. 7: Shift

Sean “2ruTh7” Evelyn is a multimedia artist and social justice advocate. His works offer a nuanced exploration of the shadowed contours of Black masculinity—merging raw introspection with a broader critique of harmful systemic cycles. His storytelling resists resolution, instead drawing audiences into the dissonance where harm and healing intersect, challenging perceptions of accountability, transformation, and the fragile terrain of human resilience. In 2016, while serving a life sentence at Norfolk prison, 2ruTh7 founded Explanations From Exile (EFE), a project addressing the impact of violence and incarceration on communities of color. Since his release in 2022, EFE has evolved into a multimedia arts justice company, blending art and activism to provoke dialogue and imagine transformative futures. Through immersive media, spoken word, and critical reflection, 2ruTh7 produces projects that confront systemic inequities while celebrating resilience and accountability. His work, deeply informed by personal experience and the broader realities of marginalized communities, constructs a space where vulnerability meets resistance. Moving between sharp critique and meditative inquiry, he invites audiences to reckon with uncomfortable truths and envision paths to restoration.

Project Description: For this edition of #HellaBlack, I would like to share a deeply personal exploration of SHIFT through spoken word and interpretive dance—a visceral performance that embodies transformation in its rawest form. Audiences can expect to witness a journey that moves through survival, harm, accountability, and healing, grappling with the contradictions that fracture both the self and society.

This performance is an invitation to feel the weight of reckoning, to experience the discomfort of confronting one’s own shadows, and to embrace the possibility of resurrection. Through movement and verse, I will illustrate the tension of becoming what I once feared, the moment survival mutates into cycles of harm, and the radical process of undoing that allows for healing.

Expect an experience that is both unflinching and tender—one that calls forth grief, resilience, and renewal. Spoken word will serve as testimony, while movement will embody the struggle and release of shifting toward accountability and liberation. This is a story of rejecting social death, reclaiming a future beyond disposability, and honoring the ongoing transformation required to build something new.

SHIFT is not just movement—it is a reckoning, a resurrection, and an insistence that even within fracture, there is the possibility of becoming whole again.