Playing games with Karma Mayet at JACK

Karma Mayet
(photo: Karl Ferguson, Jr.)

Multi-talented Karma Mayet--actor, vocalist, composer--is busy crafting something both fun and painful in Race Card at JACK, now through December 16. As the title suggests, this project gets all up into America's favorite non-favorite topic. You might remember Congresswoman Maxine Waters responding to the accusation that she's playing the race card. Words to the effect of "Good, because I've got a whole deck to play!"

Mayet, a Chicago native with roots in Mississippi, has a whole deck, too--literally--with playing cards liberally distributed around the audience seating at JACK. A fan of Bid Whist--her granny is her Bid Whist guru--she has worked out a way for an audience, even card game novices like me, to play a version of the usually intricate, fast-paced game with her as she sits at a little table with a pencil, paper and a phone full of music. The winner of each round triggers her telling of a personal story of racism in a society where macro-aggressions are fundamental and micro-aggressions are thick on the ground.

In between Mayet's true-life stories that both amuse and sting, viewers are shuffled like cards while grooving to what Mayet enjoys calling her "white jams"--the tastiest, most irresistible music made by white appropriators of Black style. ("Twenty years after you create something," she quipped, "they'll get a passable imitation.") Here and there, things might get a bit raggedy--part of the fun, actually. The overall concept rocks. The chance process and continuous audience involvement as co-creators--no two evenings will be alike--are refreshing.

And you've gotta love Mayet. Even rooted in her chair as she tells her stories, she's the Queen of movement and dynamic charm. Go play Bid Whist with her at JACK.

Race Card continues through December 16 with performances at 7:30pm, except where noted:

Saturday, December 2
Sunday, December 3
Friday, December 8
Saturday, December 9
​Sunday, December 10 at 3pm
Thursday, December 14
Friday, December 15
Saturday, December 16

For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Triple Consciousness: Black + American + Female

On Saturday, October 18,
Brooklyn Museum hosted
Body Rock: The Politics of Black Female Identity on "Stage,"
the first in a series of three conversations
co-sponsored with 651 Arts and MAPP International Productions.
photo (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Shay Wafer (l) of 651 Arts
and Lisa Yancey of MAPP International
welcome the audience to Body Rock.
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Panel moderator, Toni Blackman
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I'm not sure what I expected from an event entitled Body Rock: The Politics of Black Female Identity on "Stage." But what I took away was nourishment to keep me going in the daily struggle as a Black woman surviving and making my contributions. So, thank you to 651 Arts, MAPP International Productions, Brooklyn Museum, Rasu Jilani (MAPP Director of Community Programs), Ebony Noelle Golden (series curator), Toni Blackman (panel moderator) and panelists Pastor Desiree Allen, Charlotte Brathwaite, Karma Mayet Johnson and Shannon Washington.

"Stage," for these multi-talented sisters, means anything from an actual theater (Brathwaite acts and directs) to the pulpit (where Pastor Allen, typically sporting a pair of killer shoes, affirms rebellious personal style) to Shannon Washington's high-tech digital world. "Stage," in the title is all about space, visibility and agency--how Black women occupy environments and possibilities, how we choose to shape space for ourselves and for those around us and coming after us.

It started beautifully with Johnson's song heralding "a new day comin'" when everything would turn over and Golden declaring it "a good day to be a Black feminist." And I'm sure Golden wasn't just talking about this particular Saturday afternoon in the museum's fairly chilly auditorium. She was talking about the intense times we're in and how needed we are. "We are at a crossroads, culturally, politically and socially," said Blackman, hip hop artist and actress.

Charlotte Brathwaite
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Pastor Desiree Allen
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Shannon Washington
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Karma Mayet Johnson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The conversation, always grounded in the personal, turned to the very fact of presence as power.

"Our showing up, being here, changes everything, changes the rooms we're in," said singer-composer Johnson who regularly listens and responds to the frequencies within any environment. "There's a gift inside my being incarnated as a woman that makes my listening exponentially [heightened]," she said.

Washington, with her pioneering work as a creative director in advertising and online platforms, takes pleasure in the popularity of the selfie. "Nothing gives me more joy than a good selfie, she said. "We are not used to seeing ourselves happy on a mass media stage. There is so much power in that, so much permission." With her video storytelling project, I'm Feminist Enough, Washington takes that idea to the next level.*

Pastor Allen focuses on making "more space for Black women and girls to find themselves in relation with God" by being authentically themselves. "All of our experiences are Bibles."

The way of feminism--by that or any other name or no name--is not at all foreign to Black women, and the panelists offered up examples from their own families and colleagues. They also acknowledged the many personal and societal barriers that continue to challenge Black women--capitalist institutions, a culture of competition pitting one woman against another, a fear of facing and seeking help for hurt and trauma, and the trap of being the pulled-together, selfless one constantly available for everyone else's needs. There were calls for daily spiritual practice, no matter what form that might take, and many sighs of assent and relief when Washington wisely declared, "By any means necessary, REST!"

Watch Body Rock here.

*Visit Shannon Washington's
I'm Feminist Enough video project here.

About the Triple Consciousness series

Derived from W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “Double Consciousness”, “Triple Consciousness” speaks more acutely to the experience of black women as both black and American and also female. Through a series of three public dialogs, Triple Consciousness delves into and looks beyond the current representations of Black female identity in mainstream media and culture. Each conversation features a different theme to explore black women on “stage” and in pop-culture, and to reframe black feminism(s) in the 21st Century. Formats and discussants vary for a dynamic conversation with audience participation.

Upcoming Triple Consciousness discussions at Brooklyn Museum:

Triple Consciousness: "Mythologies of the Diva"

Saturday, November 8, 2pm

Triple Consciousness: "Beyond Binaries and Boxes"

Saturday, November 15, 2pm

Click here for information and tickets.

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

All you sinners and saints, come to a staged reading of INDIGO

SINNERS AND SAINTS FESTIVAL

curated by

Imani Uzuri

presents a special musical staged reading of

INDIGO, A BLUES OPERA 

by Karma Mayet Johnson

at Jack

Thursday, February 27, 7:30pm

At the intersection of ancestral conjure, herstorical fact, and raw ritual, INDIGO, A BLUES OPERA investigates the lesbian roots of the Blues through the lens of two lovers who refused to remain enslaved. Take the journey back to 1853 and remember...ONE NIGHT ONLY!!!

Followed by artist talk with playwright, composer and performer Karma Mayet Johnson moderated by composer, vocalist, cultural worker Toshi Reagon

Advance purchase strongly recommended. For ticket information, click here.

Jack
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Uzuri's Sinners and Saints Festival (February 26-March 1) celebrates "Black American vernacular culture (Ring Shouts, Spirituals, Blues, early Gospel, Line Singing, Praise Houses, Jazz) and their contemporary counterparts" and "improv as an ecstatic tradition and the ways in the ways in which secular and sacred often intertwine in these cultural systems."

For complete information about the Sinners and Saints Festival, click here.

Karma Mayet Johnson's "Indigo"

Karma Mayet Johnson

I should have figured that Karma Mayet Johnson's Indigo: a Blues Opera--featuring her text, composition, lyrics, choreography, direction and charismatic performance--would bring out almost everyone who's anyone in New York's vibrant Black lesbian community...and anyone who's hip in the Black arts community and then some...and then some more...and then everyone else.

I should have figured, too, that since Dixon Place comps press but does not reserve seats for press--an unnecessary holdover from the old, informal setup at Ellie Covan's tiny Bowery loft--I might end up, for the very first time, stuffed into a corner of the theater's balcony, even though I showed up early--or what would normally be early. Lucky to have that rail-side seat, though, since there were people dragging chairs they managed to find somewhere to sit behind me a couple of rows deep.

I regret it if you were not one of the roughly half-million smart people crammed into Dixon Place last night, for Indigo was a one-night-only affair. Unfair.

Can we meet up again, some time-traveling time, with handsome Bell (Ashley Brockington) and honey-sweet LizaSue (Karma Mayet Johnson), two brave, uppity women in love taking the Underground Railroad to freedom? I want to go there again and take you, too, to experience this very different slave story. If the Dixon Place sound sometimes muffled details of speech and singing, enough emotion and narrative were conveyed by carved, gestural movement and bluesy sensuality.

Visit This Is Karma, and keep watch for the possible, desirable reappearance of LizaSue and Bell.

Toshi Reagon brings the power

Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely--plus their big crew of lovely friends--really rocked the Schomburg Center last night. This return engagement for Reagon's band, part of the Center's Women's Jazz Festival 2010, was precisely the jolt of joy we need, mid-winter, and in the midst of the often demoralizing struggle for truth in this country.

You know Reagon, if you're lucky, as a talented, versatile singer, songwriter and musician with a profound ear for sonic Americana--from folk to funk, from blues to rock. She masters each of these genres with vocal strategies that easily spiral and swoop from the expressively sinuous to the hard-charging, a combination of warmth and mischief.

She's the daughter of beloved singer-activist, Sweet Honey In The Rock co-founder Bernice Johnson Reagon and shares her mom's knowledge of the power of song to focus, unite and mobilize people. If you've been lucky enough to be in Toshi's presence, you know you can't walk away from her without feeling better about yourself as a human being. She aims for nothing less.


Take all that and multiply it by everyone on the two lists below. You're in the right place when you're watching a show where the audience doesn't have to be coaxed to sing along or clap in time. They do it because it just feels right. And they accept every type of song in the spirit of generosity in which it's offered.


BIGLovely's musicianship is all good, with Adam Widoff's soaring guitar work ringing especially true. Judith Casselberry, Marcelle Davies Lashley and the guest vocalists* formed a sturdy backup for Reagon, but each also got her own excellent moment. The diversity of these spotlights was mindblowing. A day later, I'm still having a hard time deciding on my favorite, although the intense Helga Davis--singing of rallying her life, her joy, her fear and her anger, without judgment or exception, thank you--might just be the one.  

If you happened to miss the Schomburg show (tsk, tsk, tsk), just be sure to get over to New Jersey Performing Arts Center where the Reagons, mother and daughter, will be holding court (Saturday, March 20, 7:30pm).

Many thanks and all praises to:

Toshi Reagon (guitar, vocals)

Fred Cash (bass)

Adam Widoff (electric guitar)

Robert Burke (drums)

Judith Casselberry (guitar, vocals)

Marcelle Davies Lashley (vocals)

*and featured vocalists:

Helga Davis

Stephanie Battle

Josette Marchak

Karma Mayet Johnson

Morley