From Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

 

Joy Harjo (photo: Karen Kuehn, courtesy Blue Flower Arts)

I like to think of a new year being possible at any moment,

as every moment is a kind of doorway.

 

Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek)

23rd Poet Laureate of the United States of America

quoted in The New York Times

 

InfiniteBody Honor Roll 2021

InfiniteBody Honor Roll 2021

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

As always, this is not a Best-Of list, certainly, but a kind of memory palace of remarkable arts events and resources I connected with in 2021 during the continued pandemic. Given how things went this year, it was not a very dance-focused time for me, except where dancing was streamable, but it was great for catching up with streaming series I might have missed otherwise or books I now had more time to read.

2022 looks like it will start out pretty much the same. I send you, your loved ones, and your community best wishes for a safe, healthy, artful, and wonderful New Year!

 

Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You (HBO)

Omar Sy starring in Lupin (Netflix)

 

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World, written and directed by Ike Holter, world premiere, Studio Theatre, streaming from December 10, 2020 through March 7, 2021

Lupin (Part 1), directed by Marcela Said, Ludovic Bernard and Louis Leterrier, starring Omar Sy, Netflix, streaming from January 8

New Sounds Presents: ETHEL with John Schaefer, The Greene Space and WNYC and WQXR, YouTube, from January 14

 

Regina King, director, One Night in Miami (photo: Evan Agostini)

Regina King in The Harder They Fall (photo: YouTube)

One Night in Miami  (Amazon Prime Video)

 

One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from January 15

I May Destroy You, created by and starring Michaela Coel, directed by Sam Miller and Michaela Coel, HBO Max, streaming from June 7, 2020

Kapaemahu, directed by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson; animation director, Daniel Sousa; 2020; viewed February 2021

Black Art: In the Absence of Light, directed by Sam Pollard, HBO Max, streaming from February 13

Nomadland, directed by Chloé Zhao, Hulu, streaming from February 19

Mr. SOUL!, directed by Melissa Haizlip and Sam Pollard, released August 28, 2020; streaming on PBS from February 28

I Care A Lot, directed by J Blakeman, Netflix, streaming from September 12, 2020

Mank, directed by David Fincher, Netflix, streaming from December 4, 2020

Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from December 4, 2020

Megan Thee Stallion on Legendary (HBO Max)

Cast of HBO Max's A Black Lady Sketch Show

Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity, by Tracee Stanley, Shambala, 2021

Tina, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, HBO Max, streaming from March 27

Twyla Moves, directed by Steve Cantor, American Masters, PBS, streaming from March 26

All In: The Fight for Democracy, directed by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from September 9, 2020

All the Rage, by Rosamond S. King, Nightboat Books, 2021

Chasing Magic, by Ayodele Casel, streaming on The Joyce Theater website, beginning April 8

Conversation without Walls: Alice Sheppard and iele paloumpis, YouTube, April 9

Legendary (Season 1), directed by Rik Reinholdtsen, HBO Max, streaming from May 27, 2020

Legendary (Season 2), directed by Rik Reinholdtsen, HBO Max, streaming from May 6, 2021

Romeo and Juliet, National Theatre, directed by Simon Godwin, PBS Great Performances, April 23-May 21

A Black Lady Sketch Show, created by Robin Thede, directors Dime Davis (Season 1); Lacey Duke and Brittany Scott Smith (Season 2) HBO Max, streaming from 2019-2021

A Body in Fukushima, by Eiko Otake and William Johnston, Wesleyan University Press, May 2021

DanceAfrica 2021, BAM, streaming May 29 through June 10

In Treatment (all four seasons), various directors, HBO Max

The Flight Attendant, HBO Max, streaming from November 26, 2020

 

Author Clint Smith (photo: Carletta Girma)

                                                    Author Farah Jasmine Griffin (photo: Peggy Dillard Toone) 

 

Author Annette Gordon-Reed (photo: Stephanie Mitchell)

 

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich, 2021

How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, Little, Brown & Co., 2021

Naomi Osaka, directed by Garrett Bradley, Netflix, streaming from July 16

In Our Mothers' Gardens, directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis, Netflix, streaming from 2020 

Transcendant Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021

Mary J. Blige's My Life, directed by Vanessa Roth, Amazon Prime Video, 2021

Poet Warrior: A Memoir, by Joy Harjo, 2021

Surrealism Beyond Borders, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 11, 2021 through January 30, 2022

The Harder They Fall, directed by Jeymes Samuel, Netflix, streaming from November 3

 

Bo Burnham in Inside (Netflix)

Cast of Call My Agent! (Netflix)

King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, HBO Max, streaming from November 19

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin, W.W. Norton & Company, 2021

Succession, created by Jesse Armstrong, HBO Max, streaming from 2018

Inside, by Bo Burnham, Netflix, streaming from May 2021

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021

Call My Agent!, Netflix, streaming from 2015

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Before we begin tonight's program...

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
in Wilson's ...they stood shaking while others began to shout
Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Before we begin tonight’s program...

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Hello. My name is Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her/hers), and I am a non-disabled, medium-dark-skinned Black cis queer woman writer and editor and curator and counselor and mentor and atheist spiritualist mage of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage and of a certain age. I am certain that age, at this time of reckoning, is nearly 68--now just over fifteen days away. I have almost no hair, having clipped it off, nearly to the scalp, several times during this barber-less pandemic shelter-in-place, and I’m wearing a light layer of drugstore lotion and matte black eyeliner and mascara and a little bit of eyebrow pencil in a dark, greyish brown. I miss wearing dangly earrings and glossy red-brown lipstick; neither pair well with surgical masks. I am coming to you, remotely, from the light clutter of my snug and cave-like home office and also wearing an olive-green t-shirt with an image of Snoopy from Peanuts on it. The shirt is really old, a hand-me-down—maybe I should say “hand-me-over”—from my wife who had cut off the sleeves and neckband and overlapped and sewn the shoulders to make the armholes more fitted and the shirt a bit smaller across the chest, and her stitches are tiny and even. Hello. My name. Snoopy is seated in front of a bulky old computer monitor and surrounded by bits of text from the early days of the Internet (like "alt.schulz" and "FTP sites"), and the two of us--Snoopy and I--are greeting you from unceded and, in fact, stolen Lenni Lenape land just a stone’s throw away from St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery which, like a lot of things on stolen indigenous land, was built and maintained by the labor of African ancestors and where, during services held by the biblical god’s own goodly Christians, these ancestors were relegated to the balcony. I’ve sat up there. In the balcony. No, not back in the day. Though, maybe yes, if you believe in reincarnation. Which I actually think I don’t. But, no. More recently. I’ve watched Ni’Ja Whitson and their dancers from up there, through the posts of the balcony’s railing, as they performed Oba Qween Baba King Baba below for a preview audience of LGBTQIA+ folx like me. I looked down, watching a universe erupt across the warmth of a broad wooden floor. I’ve sat below and looked up, past the railing to watch Reggie Wilson’s troupe dance a passage of ...they stood shaking while others began to shout near stained-glass windows. Woman of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage. Hello. St. Mark’s Church. Among other things. Is a danspace. A constellation of spaces for the arts flickers around here in lower Mannahatta island, with star-spaces in any direction you look--walkable, if you are walking, flyable if you are a crow or a jay, though pigeons and mourning doves seem to rule the territory now. I miss the crows. I miss the jeering jays. I no longer see them or hear their corvid harshness near the trees of St. Mark’s. I am certain of my age and that, someday, I will miss the pigeons and the mourning doves, too. I am certain. This local, time-limited self I have been given pleases me. Like Audre Lorde, I treasure each identity even as I know I am a vast, capacious, timeless spiritual being having a human experience. The specificity of that human experience is the craft. That specificity is the key for the lock. The unique key for any lock, so many locks. What then, hello, if we all think of our bodies as conjurations of the Mighty Dead? So different, then...Hello. My name is...from that idea of reincarnation. Hello...I am...here, in this time, a unique key, turning in so many locks in this time of locks. Before we begin tonight’s program, I want to give an acknowledgement, acknowledging the jays I used to hear and their parental vigilance, and the red-tailed hawks who now hunt Tompkins Square Park and their august strength. I want to acknowledge the grief we humans cause and the grief we carry. I want to acknowledge that pain lives quietly, or not so quietly, inside nearly everything we make and do and, for some of us, it is the lightning bolt and jolt and juice carrying us through to the end of days. I want to acknowledge that breath is work. Hard and worthy work. At this time of reckoning.

(c)2020, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

******

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

******

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Artists Reach Out: Gabrielle Civil

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Gabrielle Civil

Gabrielle Civil in
Experiments in Joy
(photo: Dennie Eagleson)

Gabrielle Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world including in Puerto Rico, The Gambia, Ghana, Canada, Zimbabwe, and Mexico where she lived as a Fulbright Fellow. She is the author of the performance memoirs Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy (2019) and was lead contributor to Experiments in Joy: a Workbook (2019). A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Gabrielle Civil
(photos: above, Fungai Machirori. Below: Starr Rien)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

The project of living has been affected by the pandemic. The project of teaching, breathing, being, and being connected to loved ones. The project of keeping time. It’s been almost three months since these questions arrived, and I can’t believe how long it has taken me to respond--except that everything takes longer now. Things feel both sped up and slowed down. In my house, I swim through pools of time: dog paddling or trying to hold off a crashing wave but sometimes floating in memory or hope. Lately, I’ve been riding the swell of the Mississippi River from the headwinds of Minnesota all the way down to the crumbling confederate shores....

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

Maybe it was reciting a speech for MLK Day at church as a kid in a pink velveteen suit with a hat. Or poring over the “Sugar Plum Tree” in Childcraft Vol. 1 Poems & Rhymes (which I still have on my shelf). Or hearing my mother recite "Dreams" (Hold fast to dreams....) by Langston Hughes while she cooked in the kitchen. I’m not sure, but I know that literature, art, and performance have always been juicy to me.

In college, I trained as a poet. And I loved readings and open mics and slams and spoken word events but after a while, I grew restless.... I craved new cadences, new ways to circulate language in space. Despite my limited performance background--I had never seriously danced or acted on stage--I craved activating my body. In my book Swallow the Fish, I talk about turning to performance art as a way to make a different kind of poem, as a way to embody poetry itself. I move from figures of speech to figures of the body and back. That’s still the heart of my practice today.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Right now, I am practicing performance / writing. My new book, the déjà vu, is about experiential echoes and Black feminist double vision. It’s due at the end of the year, so I’m practicing imagining, crafting and believing in my wild ideas! I’m practicing dreaming and trying to show up for a new, better world that might crack through this time. I’m practicing preparing.

I’ve got a rad performance residency at Automata in LA later this summer where I’ll activate the idea of living objects. In the fall, I’ll actually teach a class with this title on Black material culture, so this embodied exploration will be key. I’m practicing serious patience. I’m writing this half way through a 14-day self-quarantine in Michigan. Once I’m done, I’ll get to see my parents in Detroit and I will hug human beings for the first time in months! I am envisioning that hug with my entire body!

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I love reading writing teaching performing art-making listening learning connecting Black people body hugging books poetry archives liberation and joy. My practice and visioning are about all of those....

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

It’s got to go deeper. The dual moment of pandemic and uprising is unprecedented and foretold. Creativity and imagination are the way forward—plus a lot of bravery. Hold fast, slow down and transform.

******

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

******

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Inconvenient Black bodies

Inconvenient Black bodies

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Our blood runs red through inconvenient bodies

that mattered when we were profitable chattel

sold, bought, traded like cattle.

We mattered when raped, forced to birth property.

We mattered when building the white man’s nation

from his soil to the skies.

We mattered when our blood ran red in southeast asia,

when it was our blood--not the white man’s,

back in his comfortable home.

We mattered when our brains, our creativity built industries.

We mattered when our own money built white wealth.

We mattered when our ballots built white power.

We build it still, which is how we manage to matter.

But we are inconvenient people,

troublesome bodies, bodies in the way of progress.

Mouths to feed.

Mouths crying, mouths questioning.

Mouths telling secrets.

We are

bodies taking up space,

holding down space desired by others.

Holding stories never meant to be heard.

Resisting names we did not and

do not choose.

Resisting definition by others.

Resisting obscurity.

Resisting obstruction.

So, we are

bodies in handcuffs.

in prisons, in the crosshairs,

at the crossroads,

under the knee

that snuffs out breath as we

make one last cry to ancestors:

gather us, please; please receive

our inconvenient spirits.

derek chauvin confidently pressed his knee

against george floyd's black neck

for nearly nine minutes, each second

precisely measured out with deadly power,

a procedure well-practiced, one might say,

meticulous in its execution,

effective in its dispatch

of one more Black

and inconvenient body.


(c)2020, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

******

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

******

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Artists Reach Out: Pamela Sneed

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. She has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is online faculty in SAIC’s low-res MFA teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the program for four consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project , MCA, The High Line, New Museum and Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for Artist, Designers, Citizens Conference/a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, The 100 Best African American Poems. In 2018, she was nominated for two PushCart Prizes in poetry. She will publish a poetry and prose manuscript, Funeral Diva, with City Lights in Fall 2020.


Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

I am working on my first musical performance which is a tribute to Big Mama Thornton. I received a commission from Denniston Hill through the Exodus Project in collaboration with Triangle Arts, Dumbo. I was doing vocal training and everything. The show was supposed to premiere this month on April 27. Because of the pandemic, it has been pushed to early November when Triangle reopens.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

It's hard for me to think back to how I became an artist as I feel now that it’s part of my DNA. I attended the New School /Lang College in the late 1980’s. Their campus was really the West and East Village. I trained as a writer there and got involved in poetry and performance through the East Village scene at the time.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

At present I am writing, performing, teaching and making visual art. I have a book coming out in the fall Oct 2020 with City Lights. It’s titled Funeral Diva, and it’s about coming of age during the AIDS era in New York and the impact on POC and LGBTQI communities. I am trying to document an important community and legacy. It’s poetry and prose. I hope to create more literature/more visual art and have more opportunities to perform on larger stages and share my political vision which is about revolution/at least that’s what my students tell me/I’m interested in social justice through the arts and interdisciplinary modes of working and thinking.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I believe many things--one, that my artistic practice is also a spiritual practice, one that keeps me whole and sane and working toward not just my own good but society's good as well. I also believe teaching is a spiritual practice and my job is to empower people to speak and express their truths through the arts. I also try to engage my students politically believing deeply the personal is political. All of my work reflects that. I also believe during this pandemic artists are on the frontlines and are also essential workers teaching people how to survive, transform and endure. My practices always reflect this. Funeral Diva is a personal and political book. My Big Mama Thornton performance project is to pay tribute to a Black woman who is known to have been a lesbian, possibly trans and was foundational to Rock and Roll.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I described in a talk that I did recently for an art school in Vienna that I consider myself to be both a pioneer in terms of  poetry and interdisciplinary forms and topics such as Black lesbian working class experience but, in duality, I also see myself as a late bloomer. I've started painting in the last five years, and this is my first year singing professionally. I am ever growing and believe I am just hurting my stride as an artist.

All of my work has been described as important in the world's landscape. I read to some students yesterday and they said my work inspired them to change and fight for social justice. I think that’s where you can locate me in the landscape.

******

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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Artists Reach Out: Rosamond S. King

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Rosamond S. King

Rosamond S. King
(selfie courtesy of the artist)

Rosamond S. King’s goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, usually in that order.

She is a creative and critical writer and performer whose work is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her guerrilla performance art has appeared somewhere near you; staged performances have been curated by: CalArts, Dixon Place, the VIVA! and Encuentro Performance Festivals, Brown University, the African Performance Art Biennale, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. She has been an Artist in Residence with ChoreoQuest and Alice Yard.

Poetry publications include the forthcoming All the Rage, the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies. Scholarly work includes Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination.

King is Creative Editor of sx salon and Director of the Institute for the Humanities & Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. She is currently working on dis/obedience, a series of linked performances, and This     intentionally left blank, a book of erasures.

www.rosamondking.com

Rosamond S. King
Jardin d'hiver still
(photo: Swati Khurana)

Brandi Rei Tucker in #SAYHERNAME
by Rosamond S. King
(photo: RestorationArts)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

For almost a year, I’ve been working on sanctuary, a collaborative outdoor performance dreamed up by Ana Maurine-Lara with Ana, Akiko Hatakeyama, Courtney Morris, and myself, directed by D’Lo. It was to be presented in May at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Oregon. There’s deep disappointment, grief even, but we’ve done so much work on it that we know it will be presented at some time….

Ironically, I had also committed myself to regularly devising in proper studios this year to continue creating dis/obedience, a series of dances….

My next book of poetry, All the Rage, coming out next year, has been affected because I thought it was done, but I’m going to add some poems reflecting on the pandemic.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I’ve basically been dancing since I could walk, and I was put into formal classes when I was  three. My parents were committed to exposing their children to the arts: dance, painting, writing, music....

I started making performance art before I knew the term. I was visiting Paris, and having a hard time. I experience a lot of racism there because my skin color, hair, style, and fluency in French mean that people read me as African, and therefore as an undocumented or unwanted immigrant. I wanted to create an embodied response to that embodied experience, so I covered my colorful body in colorful fabric from The Gambia, and moved around Jean Dubuffet’s black and white installation, Jardin d’hiver. I asked a friend to photograph me, and when I showed people the images, they called it performance art.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am literally practicing a lot by taking a lot of dance classes, and I am writing a lot of poetry. For the first month, envisioning through my own movement was difficult. I had imagined working in Mark Morris’ bright, wide studios, and now I am in the much smaller, furnished space of my apartment. But now I am finally trying to embrace our circumstances.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

Taking dance classes--and paying the instructors--aligns with how much I value creative community, particularly the communities of Caribbean and African dance, which sustain me. I am happy to dance with, learn from, and help sustain folks who are part of that.

Taking classes is also an important part of my self-care, since dancing, cooking, and sleep are probably the only times I’m not thinking about the pandemic.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I had a (long) moment when I thought the projects I am working on were irrelevant to the now, but I’ve realized that’s not true. We need sanctuary now more than ever, and people are having different responses to being in homes that are supposed to be sanctuaries. My dis/obedience series and All the Rage--both about black life in the USA today--are more relevant than ever, as black people die at alarming rates, as our deaths often go uncounted, as calls to militarize isolation will target us disproportionately--and as we continue to find and make joy, love, shine, and humor.

Beyond that, creativity of any kind reminds me that I am alive, and that life is worth living. As I say to the ghosts of the dead around me, I get to live, so I am going to live.

******

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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For Colored Girls...yesterday, today, tomorrow

Cast of the 2019 production of Ntozake Shange's
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf
at The Public Theater
(photo: Joan Marcus)

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf

The Public Theater

October 19, 2019

When, in the mid-1970s, I first saw Ntozake Shange’s Black feminist choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf--back then, if I recall, all the letters in that title were still stylishly lower-cased--my Greek-American boyfriend emerged from the theater in a state of shock and horror. As for me--a colored Caribbean-American girl for whom the queer rainbow was yet to be enough--I relished the sheer moxie of it.

As it happened, one of my editors had already given the boyfriend a look-over and quickly summed him up as “not mature enough for you,” but it took me a bit longer to figure that out for myself.

That Shange, though. In For Colored Girls, she had handed me a clue. She handed so many of us a clue.

She had dreamed forth seven women who, through experiences of pleasure and of struggle, figured things out for themselves. Adorned in a rainbow of colors--each in blue, brown, orange, red, yellow, green or purple--her “colored girls” burst into the consciousness of early 1970s New York and proceeded to spin a web of influence in the theatrical arts that has never come to an end. I have since seen Shange’s aesthetics reflected in performers and choreographers I dearly love like Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Maria Bauman, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Sydnie L. Mosley, Camille A. Brown and countless other dance, performance and spoken word artists.

Shange’s choreopoem first hit city bars, then The Public Theater for its formal premiere, then Broadway and then--maybe for worse rather than better--television and film. Now in 2019, welcomed back to The Public--under graceful direction by Leah C. Gardiner and with Camille A. Brown’s vivacious and accessible choreography--these legendary "colored girls" inhabit a small, intimate set-up encircled by audience seating. Gardiner and Brown's fantastic ensemble includes Sasha Allen (Lady in Blue), Celia Chevalier (Lady in Brown), Danaya Esperanza (Lady in Orange), Jayme Lawson (Lady in Red), Adrienne C. Moore (Lady in Yellow), Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green) and Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple).

At center: Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

With every finger snap, every hand clap, every stomp, every swirl, every satisfied press and slip of hands against their own bodies, Shange’s characters insist that attention finally be paid to Black women marginalized and endangered by racism and patriarchy. Because they have learned to pay attention to themselves. Know themselves. Enjoy themselves. Famously, find god in themselves. They speak the truths life has taught them.

Choreography connects the cast through a percolating, expandable cypher that protects childlike play--the inevitable “Little Sally Walker” clapping game--the embodied relaying of amusing, sexy or harrowing stories and the communal, compassionate laying on of healing hands. Movement turns poetic text vividly three-dimensional; through physical expression, memories become all the more shareable with an audience willing to be moved. Bring tissues. I needed a few.

Scenic design and lighting create an atmosphere of permission (the disco balls at first retracted above the stage), a space for sensory indulgence (those clustered hangings of abstract stalactites rotating through lights of deep colors). Original compositions by American Roots and soul artist Martha Redbone and hits from generations past--”Dancing in the Streets,” “Stay in My Corner”--underscore and heighten the narratives’ driving intensity.

Sasha Allen, an exciting singer,
portrays Shange's Lady in Blue.
(photo: Joan Marcus)

It's time to discover--or rediscover--the joy and potency of For Color Girls. Go and discover Wailes, a deaf actor and dancer of eloquent charm and fluidity who absolutely dazzles. Rediscover Okpokwasili, a star of contemporary dance and performance, whose trenchant, urgent presentation of one of Shange's most famous soliloquies reminds us--us colored girls, at least--that there's still always going to be someone new trying to walk off wid alla our stuff.

Scenic design: Myung Hee Cho

Costume design: Toni-Leslie James

Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang

Sound design: Megumi Katayama

Understudy: D. Woods

Director of American Sign Language: Onudeah Nicolarakis

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf has been extended through Sunday, December 8. For information and tickets, click here.

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street (at Astor Place), Manhattan

(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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Bobbie Louise Hawkins, 87

Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Beat Poet and Author, Dies at 87
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, May 18, 2018

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Sam Hamill, 74

Sam Hamill, Poet, Publisher and War Protester, Dies at 74
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, April 26, 2018

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J.D. McClatchy, 72

J.D. McClatchy, Poet of the Body, in Sickness and Health, Dies at 72
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 11, 2018

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Lucie Brock-Broido, 61

Lucie Brock-Broido, Inventive Poet, Is Dead at 61
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 10, 2018

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Claribel Alegría, 93

Claribel Alegría, 93, Poet for Central America’s Voiceless, Dies
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 6, 2018

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Keorapetse Kgositsile, 79

Keorapetse Kgositsile, 79, South African Poet and Activist, Dies
by Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times, January 16, 2018

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Defending the Black dead: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko at Abrons

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko in Séancers,
a world premiere at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Amanda Jensen)

(photo: Erik Carter)

Séancers has landed at Abrons Arts Center like something to gladden the hearts of Sun Ra...and Fela...and Toni Morrison. An audacious, extravagant, overstuffed masquerade enclosing--and sometimes exposing--a gentle, vulnerable core. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko starts off almost backing into the space and backing into performing, gingerly, tentatively talking his way into the thick of things with help, on the night I attended, from a brief exchange with Autumn Knight, another interdisciplinary artist. Each night, Kosoko engages a different companion and wayshower. He calls these helpers Special Guest Séancers.

He appears to meander, physically, verbally, like a warm-up, a figuring out, a taking of temperatures--the room, his own--a way to let his ancestral spirits know he's ready to be inhabited. He fumbles a little, trying to recall exact scripture from bell hooks and James Baldwin; notes that part of his opening represents an homage to Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres; ambushes us with poet Audre Lorde's searing, furious "Power."

Abrons's Experimental Theater, from the top audience row (where composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste generates swoony, enveloping weather) to the far wall of the space, is splashed with all manner of glittery and quaint stuff I can't even begin to inventory--from silver-wrapped Hershey's kisses to rippling, gleaming sheets of golden Mylar and everything in between.

The tiny-fonted program notes include a long, long, long list of members of the creative and production team including a dramaturg, "performance doulas," and the "Special Guest Séancers," a statement about Séancers, a further, and longer, "STATEMENT ABOUT THE WORK" by Kosoko, and a full-paged, three-columned, footnoted, intriguing and quite comprehensive essay about the work by acclaimed dance scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild. All of it quite hard to get much into with typical low lighting and the pre-show chatter of people around you. Read it--carefully--at home. It is its own work of art.

This massive documentation--which, frankly, leaves me to think, "What's left to say?"--is likely strategic, a necessary shot across the bow of any presumptuous critic looking to clamp nasty, dirty paws all over an artist's bright new efforts. It says, "I'll document my work myself, thank you very much!" I sympathize--believe me, I do--but I also had to take all of this and lay it to the side.

There is also this, from promotional text for Séancers:

Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is a nonlinear examination of how the American racialized body uses psychic, spiritual, and theoretical strategies to shapeshift through socio-politically charged fields of loss and oppression.

... collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history and coloniality, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of the Black imagination to traverse the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility and gender complexity.

So...everything. Everything. Also laid aside...to make room for me to see what I could see.

The work--this apparition, hallucination, ritual container for all of the above--is only 65 minutes. In that time, I saw a man capable of wearing sweetness and bewilderment as easily as he wore jet black fake eyelashes and exquisite costumes sending two inseparable messages--the bold and the delicate. I saw a spirit land as Kosoko's arms and writhing body swished streamers of golden Mylar. I heard him intone the words "get lost" several times like a mantra...or a directive...or, a simple plea. I heard words about trying, about getting tired. I saw the armor of oversized glasses and bespangled bodysuits. And I saw the letting go...of costumes, of coverings. The shedding and sloughing off. The retracing of steps, away from the crossroads, back up the stairway, into piercing light.

Séancers continues through Saturday, December 9 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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