Drury and Rankine: award-winning writers challenge whiteness

MaYaa Boteng portrays Keisha,
the pivotal character in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview
(photo: Julienta Cervantes)

Hosted by Brooklyn's Center for Fiction and presented with Theater Communications Group, playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury and poet Claudia Rankine sat in conversation about Drury's Pulitizer-winning play, Fairview (2018), and Rankine's first published play, The White Card (March 2019). Both stories have scenes centered around a dinner party and deal with race and white surveillance, ultimately training a floodlight on what whiteness is and what it does. The writers discussed Fairview, mostly, including Rankine's experience of seeing Drury's play in the company of a white woman, a close friend and colleague, who (literally) failed to rise to its challenge. So, The White Card, which I have neither seen nor read will remain more of a mystery to me for a bit longer.

Though highly anticipated, the event proved to be frustrating, beginning with its late start (a half-hour) and a curious mismatch of speakers--both thoughtful, distinguished artists--whose personas could not have been more different. Rankine more reserved and watchful, read not from The White Card but from her essay responding to Fairview and contributed careful, finely-wrought, even mournful analysis at select moments. Drury, more accessible and endearing, too often seemed like a nervous student in awe of a visiting star scholar who is, yes, a MacArthur-certified genius. Rakine's 2014 multiple award-winning volume of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, zoomed her into mainstream awareness as a critical witness to everyday racist microaggressions that, along with the fundamental nature and tenacity of white supremacy, make any mention of "post-racial America" an absurd lie. Would that The Center for Fiction could have magically blended these two writers into one fascinating being.

Rankine largely supported Drury in working through the creative process and the varying audience responses to Fairview, a play that first soothes and reassures white audience members with a familiar sit-com scenario and then asks them to participate in gradual, then increasingly unsettling, hard-to-escape exposure of their own white privilege. This conversation gave me a moment to revisit my own reaction to Fairview's final section where the teenager Keisha invites white people to rise from their seats and reassemble on the stage. As a Black woman, I immediately got the system-tilting shift Drury was going for in this theatrical exercise, and I must admit I felt a little smug. No, a lot smug. I also recall that the white people in the SoHo Rep audience I had sat with were all quite cooperative. From Drury's report, it seems that reaction was far from common.

As with reading Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, I'm struck, once again, by a sense of unacknowledged tragedy--what Rankine refers to as the loneliness an oppressed person feels, the sense of having been abandoned by all to injustice. On many levels, for many reasons, so many of us live with unhealed trauma. Gaslighting deepens and worsens the tenacious psychological/emotional effects of injustice. It messes with our overall health as individuals, communities and a society, and we're living in a time when gaslighting is pretty much the National Anthem.

Artists like Drury and Rankine bring heroic witness to this incendiary, potentially transitional time. The rest is up to us--to clean these uncovered wounds and allow them to heal.

Learn about The Center for Fiction and its upcoming events--such as evenings with authors like Edwidge Danticat, Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins--here.

The Center for Fiction
15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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In step with Joséphine: Julia Bullock at The Met

Soprano Julia Bullock
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Julia Bullock
Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine
The Great Hall
Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 16-17

The two-page, finely-written program notes Julia Bullock contributed for her production, Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, performed on the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum's Great Hall, takes me back to a practice I abandoned a couple of years ago--saving programs from all the shows I see. I no longer save them much beyond the year of their season, but this one, this one, will live with me, just as the life, struggles and example of Joséphine Baker clearly live with Bullock, a Black opera singer of profound insight and commitment to social justice.

Bullock--the Met's 2018-2019 Artist in Residence--starts her notes by quoting famed New Yorker writer Janet Flanner whose references to Baker's "caramel-colored body" and "lovely animal visage," the "dawning intelligence" of her look, along with Baker's apparent failure to have "heard of Mozart" are like textbook examples of white supremacist arts criticism. Dropping this nightmare on the page, Bullock then proceeds to hail Baker for achieving superstar--and super-paid--status during Jim Crow when her level of success was unimaginable for any Black performer. Further, for anyone obsessed with the image of caramel-colored Baker dancing in a costume made of bananas, Bullock notes Baker's role in the French Resistance and our own Civil Rights movement, and even the way the entertainer turned her simplistically-eroticized image--her skin turned into a costume, as she says, her body a "shattered object" that wants a home, wants to be owned--into one of self-defined, self-determined Black power and woman power.

The essay--which goes on to detail a creative process encouraged by director Peter Sellars with a team of remarkable collaborators--ends in a proud, uncompromising affirmation of the complexity of human nature, Baker's and Bullock's as well. Both women aim to rip our stereotypes right out from under us.

Is it possible to not only save program notes forever but stand up and give them a rousing cheer?

Bullock's soprano has depth and edge; it draws you into a resonant cave. When she first comes into view, high on the Great Hall's grand staircase, she stands stockstill, an icon draped neck to toes in formal black, her hair a dark-russet 'fro which will eventually be lit to halo-ing effect. Remote and rigid, she seems an apparition from the grave, her face, seen from a distance below, a cloudy blur that does not resolve into recognizable features.

That will change. Bullock does descend, at times, to a mid-point landing to join the work's composer Tyshawn Sorey (percussion/piano) or to the lower steps where members of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) craft a sinuous and textured sonic fabric for her plainspoken testimony as Baker, channeled by writer Claudia Rankine. "One day, I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be Black," Bullock says, as Baker. And she calls the US "barbarous."

It's haunting, confusing, disturbing when she reveals that her dancing was actually a form of running. Would that mean fearful escape? Or would it mean resistance? Or some combination? How are we to understand this Joséphine (or this Julia who identifies so closely with her)?

The long-ago familiar--a dancing of the Charleston, a warbling of "Bye Bye Blackbird"--are rendered with an insistent, high-strung dissonance. Bullock's training in dance becomes clear immediately, but the entirety of the performance rests on her skillful ability to move various energies of feeling through her body--from the initial, regal dignity to mischief to brooding quiet to unnerving thunderclaps of anger and power.

Creative team:

Julia Bullock, soprano
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE):

• Alice Teyssier, flute
• Ryan Muncy, saxophone
• Rebekah Heller, bassoon
• Daniel Lippel, guitar
• Jennifer Curtis, violin 

Conceived by Peter Sellars
Tyshawn Sorey, composer, percussion, and piano
Zack Winokur, director
Claudia Rankine, text (featuring the words of Josephine Baker, adapted by Julia Bullock and Zack Winokur)
Michael Schumacher, choreographer
Mark Grey, sound design
John Torres, lighting design
Carlos Soto, clothing design

Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine concludes this evening with a performance at 8pm. Seating is very limited and likely sold out, but for information, click here.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue (enter at 81st Street main entrance), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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"What Remains": Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls collaborate

from What Remains,
a new work by Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls,
premiered this week at Danspace Project
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

“One thing about being black in America—you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life,” says Rankine to The New York Times. “So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night?…Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

Adds Rawls, “One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance…Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”

-- Danspace Project publicity for What Remains

At what point can I just be?

A few years ago, I read poet Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and felt immediate, grateful identification in her detailing of both the overt and the deceptively subtle aggressions Black people endure, every day, in our society. Racism--within white, patriarchal supremacy--is the American condition, something that does not go away because a Black president gets elected. In fact, as we certainly recognize now, such an unexpected shock to the system only wakes and further enrages the persistent many-headed Hydra.

Upon hearing that Rankine, as writer, would team up with dance artist Will Rawls, I knew, at once, that we should not expect anything as straightforward as Citizen. Rawls--winner of the 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer--comes from that sector of dance that embraces the oblique, the abstract, the elusive, that leaves pin pricks and cracks and often big gaping holes in the fabric of a work for the light--and, ultimately, the viewer's mind--to get in.

What Remains--co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française for FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival--would not be Citizen. And I'm going to be danged honest and tell you that part of me rolled my eyes when I thought about that. The other part of me, though, was chill and is now glad all of me got there.

Rawls has a dream team of collaborating performers for this work--Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (also his sound designer and composer), Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty and Tara Aisha Willis. Draped by designer Eleanor O'Connell in funereal black and haunting St. Mark's sanctuary with its stained glass windows also shrouded in black, they have been described as "a resonant, ghostly chorus."

What they most appear to be are embodiments of the undead spirit of resistance. Nimble, resourceful and unruly, they rise from unshapely, ungainly lurching and stumbling and gentle, quiet harmonizing to steadily refine and define themselves, both physically and vocally, over a solid 70 minutes of un-curtailing their movements. There are musical surprises in this séance that delighted the hell out of me and an ingenious synergy of space, darkness and scattered lighting that transforms the church into mutating dreamscape. I won't spoil any of this for anyone lucky enough to get in to see the final show tonight.

Yes, if you were to have a house haunted by not one but a whole batch of brilliant Black artists--pent-up spirits reclaiming their time at the mic or piano bench--I imagine you might have something like Rawls and Rankine's What Remains. Something more tickling than scary...at least to a Black woman like me. I can imagine some people might find all of this deeply frightening.

Creative Consultant: John Lucas
Production design: David Szlasa

What Remains concludes tonight with a show at 8pm, with no late seating. Tickets are sold out, but a wait list starts at the door beginning at 7:15. For information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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An audience with Angie Pittman

Dancer-choreographer Angie Pittman (photo: Scott Shaw)

Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is a diptych that grapples with ways to give love, receive love, be cool, be resilient, achieve survival, and daydream. Sequined Kisses... is an exploration of interiority, and its relationship to compression, love and joy within the context of historical trauma against Black folk. ...VazLean centers “cool” as an African Diasporic concept through greasiness, lubrication, and James Brown cape choreography. Together, these two pieces are a journey towards what Donnell Alexander calls “finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”

Presented as part of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen, Angie Pittman's performance of conjoined solos--Sequined Kisses and Vazlean--seemed like a half-hallucinated audience with Black shamanic or ancestral royalty. The James Brown/Prince lineage, in particular. One night only--and for your eyes only, lucky ones.

We saw her partly in dim light and, even when bathed in spotlight, in a form that seemed indirect and indistinct, often twirling or oriented sideways, never giving us a good look in the eye. Moving and gesturing as if through a fishbowl filled with gel. Here and not here.

The radiant white-and-gold satin cape (designed by Athena Kokoronis), which Pittman wore at the top of the hour, was lifted away by a tender supplicant and only returned late in the action. Musical voices accompanying her were often unpleasantly muddled and distorted, discordant and abrasive as if they, too, represented someones not of this time. Many pasts accumulated into the present.

Our evening with Pittman unfolded in a much-transformed performance space that turned what is normally inclined rows of audience seating into dark, bleak mountain for the holy descent and re-ascent of a spiritual being. The audience--and we were many--sat in semicircular rows opposite this "mountain," watching Pittman gradually forge her path down its central steps, her movements suggesting an effort to turn a three-dimensional body into bold, iconic marks against a black surface. Ancient, enigmatic, beautiful, powerful.

Powerful, especially, when reaching the black floor and whirling nearly--but never--out of balance on the dips and surge of the music, her surefootedness a thrill and an instruction. Vulnerable to the risk of stumbling and yet taking care of herself in the midst of the ecstasy she claimed.

Angie Pittman: Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is closed.

The Kitchen's visual art exhibition of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness continues through August 3. Artists include Josh Begley, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ken Gonzales-Day, Kate Greenstreet, Titus Kaphar, Baseera Khan, Charlotte Lagarde, Seung-Min Lee, Glenn Ligon, Mores McWreath, Sandeep Mukherjee, Native Art Department International, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Cindy Sherman, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Anicka Yi. For information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (west of 10th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Claudia Rankine, at 92Y, on the psyche under racism

Claudia Rankine

Poet Claudia Rankine's multiple award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) artfully documents the experience of being Black and embattled by racist aggressions, both macro and micro. Some of these aggressions can be so very, very subtle as to make the person on the receiving end wonder if she is imagining things. In a society in deep, purposeful, willful denial about the legacy and continued pervasiveness of racism, Black people walk around with original trauma compounded, on the daily, in numerous ways that can tear at our overall well-being. Rankine brings all of this out in her book, and it was exciting to see this literary hero in person and hear her read passages from Citizen last night in an Unterberg Poetry Center event at 92Y.

Billed as "a conversation on art, trauma and social justice," the evening opened well with Rankine's introductory remarks and reading but took an odd turn as Cleonie White and Sarah Stemp, clinicians from the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, joined the author onstage. That might have seemed a reasonable pairing, given Rankine's concern for the way that racism threatens the health of individuals as well as societies. However, it turned awkward, particularly as Stemp delivered a long, labored statement before the increasingly restive audience.

Rankine betrayed no impatience, but the multigenerational, largely white crowd voiced displeasure several times, yelling "Ask questions!" at Stemp and even criticizing one another when, after something like 75 minutes, the floor was finally opened for their own questions. Even before the outbursts, though, you could sense an unhappy vibe around the hall. It felt less like a dignified literary event and more like a music gig where the crowd realizes it isn't getting what it came for.

At one point, Rankine mentioned the concept of "ethical loneliness"--that undercurrent of isolation--when you live in a society diametrically opposed to your ethics. Her observation was not only intellectual, it had a personal feeling tone that reached me. I got my pen out and made a note just as Rankine took matters further, adding how hard it is, in that situation, "if you don't have people...or you can't pay for people."

That got White's attention. She quickly responded that the Institute accepts sliding scale, a defensive rejoinder that seemed to come from out of nowhere. How had White envisioned this event, then? As a marketing tool?

I turned to the friendly woman on my right and whispered, "This is just not gelling. I don't know what's going on here." She agreed--"It's like they didn't communicate beforehand"--and made an early exit. I hung on but left a little bit into the audience Q&A.

So, what to tell you? Read Citizen: An American Lyric. Just read it.

For information on upcoming events at 92Y, click here.

92nd St Y
Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Poet as witness: Claudia Rankine reads from "Citizen: An American Lyric"

On October 30, 2014 Claudia Rankine gave this reading from Citizen: An American Lyric (2014 National Book Award) and discussed American racism, police violence, and responsibility at the Williams College Museum of Art. Her words, of course, remain fresh, relevant and insightful.

Poet Claudia Rankine: Uncovering violence in the day-to-day

Poet Claudia Rankine on the violent deaths of black men
by Mary Jo Brooks, PBS NewsHour, December 4, 2014

Lisa Jarnot, Claudia Rankine to read, Poetry Project

The Poetry Project

presents

Lisa Jarnot and Claudia Rankine

December 17, 8pm

Lisa Jarnot is the author of six collections of poetry and a biography of the poet Robert Duncan (The Ambassador from Venus, 2012, University of California Press). She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens with her husband and daughter and works as a freelance gardener.

Claudia Rankine is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Citizen, which was realeased by Graywolf in October 2014 and has since been nominated for a National Book Award. Rankine currently teaches at Pomona College.

Facebook event page

The Poetry Project
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

In this moment with poet Claudia Rankine

A Poetry Personal and Political
Claudia Rankine on ‘Citizen’ and Racial Politics
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, November 28, 2014

Claudia Rankine wins Jackson Poetry Prize

Claudia Rankine Wins $50,000 Poetry Prize
by John Williams, The New York Times, April 21, 2014

The Foundry's magical history tour

A tour bus, owned and driven by Mary Wallace (top, mirrored),
makes its way through the South Bronx in The Foundry Theatre's
production of The Provenance of Beauty. Photos: courtesy of The
Foundry Theatre


Innovative performers try all kinds of ways to shake up and engage audiences, breaking through the fourth wall and messing with the environment in which audiences think they can safely hide and objectively judge. Some of these approaches aren't terribly fresh; others seem gimmicky; still others can backfire--but not in the case of The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, the latest production of The Foundry Theatre. Taking a tour bus filled with people on a poetic, eye-opening tour of the neighborhoods, history and contemporary social, economic and environmental issues of the South Bronx turns out to be powerfully effective and, yes, beautiful theater.

This travelogue, written by poet Claudia Rankine, created by Rankine with Foundry's founder Melanie Joseph, and directed by Joseph and Shawn Sides, runs for 90 minutes, during which the audience sits in air-conditioned comfort and separation from its object of attention--just as if it were safely tucked away in a darkened proscenium theater. But, here, the audience is on the move, in a bus, through the huge, winding geography of an unorthodox performance space that lives and breathes. The South Bronx plays itself. Bus owner/driver Mary Wallace maneuvers this unusual route; her driving is a skillful, sensitively-timed dance.

Our journey takes us out of one borough (from the curb in front of an East Harlem church) into the streets and past the landmarks of another (the Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Mott Haven), both home to predominantly poor and working-class people of color. On the day that I took the tour, the bus riders were mostly white theater-goers. Rankine's narration--voiced live by Sarah Nina Hayon and on recording by Raúl Castillo and Randy Danson--addresses the fraught relationship of gazer and gazed-at, desire for acquisition of land, the complicated nature of development and gentrification in old, storied neighborhoods, "the beauty of a place pulled out of the abandonment of another."

"What you look at will look back at you," Hayon says, as we roll towards the Willis Avenue Bridge and contemplate the moment at which it became amusing to New York's rapidly-assimilating white immigrants to shake their heads as they remembered their Latin-izing neighborhoods and quip, "The Bronx? No thonx!" I spied a sign reading, "The Bronx--All-American City," just as Hayon evoked memories of Howard Cosell's 1977 declaration, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Bronx is burning."

Truly, much of what the audience sees, beyond its ironic, glass-enclosed captivity, is grim and worrisome. There's the prison barge and the gate where families enter to visit their loved ones; the Duane Reade colonizing a distinctive building that once housed a bustling dance hall; the Giuliani-bestowed green space sitting at the lip of a poisoned river, between a rock (a fertilizer plant) and a hard place (a waste water treatment plant). Even cheerful memories of La Lupe--"the woman with the devil in her body"--are compromised by the story of how this vivacious singer ended her days in poverty.

But let me assure you, there's life, and there's beauty. The bus windows subtly mirror each other. Each one creates not only a view of whatever and whoever is actually moving past your window but also a continuous, ghostly, kaleidoscopic stream of imagery from the opposite window. Well, you have to see it to believe how dazzling--and disorienting--this overlapping of actual and reflected human, vehicular and architectural imagery can be. Rankine's text sometimes hits (and hits hard) and sometimes misses (in fuzzy poetic musing) but often informs and challenges. She's at her best when she makes us think and when she conspires with the South Bronx to make us feel.

We roll along, unable to speak to the people we see outside our windows, people who rarely look toward us to make eye contact. I came to doubt that our contact would be welcomed. (A big tour bus? Filled with mostly white people?) By the time Mary Wallace momentarily pulled the bus into a somewhat spruced-up sector bearing the ominous name of SoBro, this confinement and isolation was beginning to hurt my heart. Then, to make matters worse, Hayon got off the bus and slipped away, melting into the landscape, rejoining the South Bronx in the act of being itself. I watched her go and keenly felt her absence.

We powered up and took the Third Avenue Bridge back to Manhattan.


East Harlem's Elmendorf Reformed Church.
The pickup/dropoff point for The Provenance
of Beauty. Photo: (c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Provenance of Beauty rolls now through late October. Get on the bus. For complete schedule information and ticketing, click here.

The Bronx is up

Busing Audiences to the Bronx
Alexis Clements, The L Magazine, September 2, 2009