Activity

Watch Tay Roger’s award-winning Music Film alongside their chapter “Feeling Our Way Through: On Making a Dissertation Film”

Watch NOA: a music Film HERE

Film cover image for NOA, featuring a nude figure partially submerged in water, arms lifted out as if to fly.

NOA: a music film is a companion piece to its 2019 namesake album and is a collaborative project which includes movement, poetry, music, and improvisation. The film weaves together nine songs featuring seven on-screen independent Chicago-based artists, and forming a non-linear story that strives to understand how to embrace and transform loss in our contemporary world. Each character brings their own perspective and creative vessel to this multidisciplinary exploration of grieving and healing; the aim is to infect viewers with the same kind of emotional bravery exhibited in its storytelling.

A figure (Tay Rogers) reaches toward an open doorframe in the woods, a portal of some kind.

Teaching NOA: a music film

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Teaching NOA: a music film 〰️

In a 2025 interview conducted over several months and published in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (also available open access through Academia), Lauren Guilmette engaged Tay Rogers on the making of their film, with responses and questions by Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel. Amy and Qrescent also contributed chapters to Feminist Making, Doing & Sensing (Chapter 20, Chapter 2, and Lauren’s rendition of Qrescent’s keynote lecture in Chapter 1) which bear on the questions they raise to Tay’s film. Along with this interview, their chapters can be assigned alongside Tay’s own chapter (Chapter 21) and the film itself (free on YouTube).

Classic feminist texts, referenced in NOA: a music film and free online, to assign alongside these chapters of Feminist Making, Doing & Sensing:

Tay designed this handout on teaching Lorde with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” ideal for introductory students in philosophy courses. This worksheet can be used as a preparatory assignment before watching the film. Here are some reflection questions for after viewing the film:

  • Is clarity always the goal of knowledge in Lorde and NOA? How does that compare to Plato’s emphasis on seeing things “as they really are”?

  • Plato is suspicious of the body and emotion as sources of illusion. Lorde and Rogers treat feelings as a form of intelligence. How do these positions fundamentally disagree about what truth is?

Here is a recorded virtual class visit, when Tay visited Lauren’s “Queering Philosophy” class at Elon University, January 2024, to discuss NOA.

Students and interested readers are also encouraged to check out the interviews with collaborating artists in NOA, included on the film’s website. Tay’s website, emotionalphilosopher.com, has more resources.

First third of a three-part header image for the film, with trees and grasses in the backdrop, listing the filmmakers (Tay Rogers and Lillian Walker) and cast (Jason Jackson, Bea Cordelia, Alana Parekh, Haydee Souffrant, Jason Raynard, Pamela Cherman
Central piece of a three-part header image for the film, with trees and grasses in the backdrop, listing the filmmakers (Tay Rogers and Lillian Walker) and cast (Jason Jackson, Bea Cordelia, Alana Parekh, Haydee Souffrant, Jason Raynard, Pamela Cherm
Last third of a three-part header image for the film, with trees and grasses in the backdrop, listing the filmmakers (Tay Rogers and Lillian Walker) and cast (Jason Jackson, Bea Cordelia, Alana Parekh, Haydee Souffrant, Jason Raynard, Pamela Chermans
Film still of tree trunks growing out of a body of water, serene, the light from a blue sky reflecting off the water.
Film still of a white person with a partially shaved head and reddish top-knot reaches toward a door frame, a kind of portal, which has emerged suddenly in a forest (trees and grasses in the backdrop, behind the person reaching toward the portal).
Film still of a Black femme figure wearing layers of red clothing reaches toward a mirror.
Film still of group of four people dance interpretively alongside the waters of Lake Michigan.
Film still of a man signing in ASL in a park
Film still of a South Asian woman with long hair, wrapped in a sheet on a bed, positioned in the middle of a decaying church covered in graffiti.
The text reads: "I see this project as a kind of storytelling... like a modified version of Telephone. Someone tells their story, and there's the courageousness of that. Then they touch something in somebody else, infecting them with a courage of the
The text reads: "NOA: a music film is a companion piece to the contemporary folk album "NOA" (released by Taylor Rogers in 2019), and is a highly collaborative project which includes movement, poetry, music, and improvisation. The film weaves togethe
The text reads: "NOA strives to highlight the fact that suffering and loss are an inherent part of life, and that darkness has its place in the order of all things. We live as a society that wants to ignore grief and doesn't acknowledge sorrow as a f
Film still of femme figures dressed in white, engaged in a baptismal ritual of sorts in the water
Film still of a person emerging from the water, screaming
Film still of femme figures dressed in white, engaged in a ritual near the water
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