Dreaming America with Sekou Sundiata

Singer Ronnell Bey
from the 51st (dream) state

Launched in April and concluding tomorrow night, Blink Your Eyes: Sekou Sundiata Revisited festival has spanned numerous performance sites around town, paying tribute to the Black poet-griot-activist who died in 2007. A presentation of MAPP International Productions, Blink Your Eyes offers a timely retrospective of Sundiata's work and of questions that preoccupied him, such as the still unfinished business of realizing American democracy and justice.

Last evening, the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in Soho presented Sundiata's final theatrical work, the 51st (dream) state, in an adaptation for radio broadcast before a live audience. It was directed by Arthur Yorinks and hosted by John Schaefer of WNYC's Soundcheck. The unusually close, intimate space at the Greene heightened connection between audience members and an array of wonderful performers including jazz singer La Tanya Hall (taking Sundiata's role of narrator) and the original vocalists, Ronnell Bey, Audrey Martell, Bora Yoon and Samita Sinha.

La Tanya Hall as Poet/Narrator

Vocal cast of The 51st (dream) state
L-r: Hall, Bora Yoon, Ronnell Bey, Samita Sinha and Audrey Martell

Aside from a few times when the flourish of music swallowed Yoon's or Sinha's occasionally wispy vocalizing--both otherwise shine in quieter, spirit-filled passages--the work proceeded with fearless honesty and radiance. The small band--led by musical director/trumpeter Eddie Allen and conducted by Richard Harper--was tight, authoritative, sensuous to the max. Sitting just a few feet away, we could feel, to the core, everything they set before us.

The 51st (Dream) State is a post-9/11 meditation and intervention. Although, as Schaefer chose to emphasize, this is not "a 9/11 piece," Sundiata did not shrink from vividly invoking chilling imagery from that time of horror. He did so with exceptional courage to witness reality, free of sentimentality, and to grapple with consequences. And then he urged us to move on because we must--as a nation in flux and possibility--visualize who we want to be when we grow up.

Sundiata concluded with this challenge: "Why don't we get our hopes up too high?"

The poet has gone. His irreverent question resounds.

Watch the Blink Your Eyes presentation of the 51st (dream) state in its entirety here:

Blink Your Eyes: Sekou Sundiata Revisited continues with these remaining programs:

Days of Art & Ideas: Democracy, Imagination and Peeps of Color Now, a panel discussion at Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Days of Art & Ideas: Blood, Muscle, Bone: the anatomy of wealth and poverty. Discussion and presentation on community-engagement by dance artists Liz Lerman and Jawole Zollar at Harlem Stage at Aaron Davis Hall. Saturday, October 12, 4pm-6pm. Free with reservation. Click here.

WeDaPeoples Cabaret: Fall 2013 at Harlem Stage at Aaron Davis Hall, Saturday, October 12, 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Checking out "Fela!" at Soundcheck

WNYC's Soundcheck program hosted an intimate in-studio performance today at The Greene Space, featuring the musical duo Dean & Britta and cast members of Broadway's Fela!

Dean Wareham (guitar, vocals) and Britta Phillips (keyboards, vocals) will launch a limited-edition deluxe double CD next Tuesday—13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests.

“It's kind of like making a music video but backwards,” said Wareham of their intriguing commission to score Warhol's simply shot, slowed-down portraits of Factory studio pals like Nico, Jane Holzer and Mary Woronov. The duo opened with “I'll Keep It With Mine,” the Dylan song Nico recorded on Chelsea Girl. They followed with the darkly dreamy, twangy “I Found It Not So”--written for a film of Woronov but mistakenly accompanying a film of Holzer thoroughly, endlessly brushing her pearly whites. I had to agree with Soundcheck host John Schaefer: Mistake or not, the song and the film fit!

Look for Wareham and band, including Phillips, performing Galaxie 500 songs at the Bowery Ballroom, August 19. Complete show information

Soundcheck audio and more information on Dean & Britta

You haven't seen Bill T. Jones's Fela! in any of its incarnations? I don't even want to talk to you. But the irresistible samples Schaefer offered this afternoon--with Fela! star Sahr Ngaujah, other company members and the magnificent musicians from Antibalas rocking the show's versions of "Everything Scatter," "Upside Down" and especially "Water Get No Enemy"--should get more folks there. The little Greene Space was packed with people arranged in orderly rows, but it was hard to stay seated.

Recently, Femi Kuti--son of the late Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, and a renowned singer-bandleader in his own right--visited the Broadway show for the first time. He was moved to tears. Ngaujah told us, "Femi said that [his father] would have been quite amused by what we're doing--in the best way!"

Soundcheck audio and more information on Fela!

Fela! on Broadway website

The Greene Space information and schedule