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

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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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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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"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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World premiere of Geraldine Inoa's "Scraps" at The Flea

Roland Lane (left), Alana Raquel Bowers (bottom center),
Michael Oloyede (top center) and Tanyamaria (right).
the main cast members of Scraps at The Flea
(photo: Hunter Canning)

What we always hear: “Black Male Shot by White Police Officer.” What we never see: how loved ones struggle to cope amidst their anger and grief.

-- from program notes for Scraps

In its new Tribeca home and its fresh new season devoted to "Color Brave" programming, The Flea Theater comes out swinging with Scraps, a psychological drama by LA-based playwright and television writer Geraldine Inoa, directed by Niegel Smith. With a strategy similar to Jackie Sibblies Drury's recent Fairview (Soho Rep), another theater piece examining race in America, Inoa carefully grounds her audience in the familiar before hauling us into bizarre territory. Hard to tell, though, which one hauls with the rougher hand: Fairview's second and third acts seem more cleverly conceptual while Scraps goes full-out surreal nightmare with a menacing Greek tragedy-style chorus.

The 85-minute piece takes place in The Flea's tiny Siggy Theater on a shallow stage not even a leg-stretch away from the audience's first row, a set-up that will only become more engulfing and threatening as this tale of Black urban life and racist police violence proceeds. Inoa introduces us to four main characters--connected by race, culture, neighborhood and personal history--whose interactions become complicated by grief, resentment and fear.

All roles are played by members of the Flea's resident acting troupe, The Bats. We first meet unemployed Jean-Baptiste (Roland Lane) who deftly raps up a bleak, nearly Shakespearean take on the prospects for a Black man under white supremacy. Like his namesake, he's a voice of one crying in the wilderness, and a stern warning.

Inoa quickly--maybe too much so, too stereotypically--gives him a nemesis in the form of Calvin (Michael Oloyede), a London-based college student now home in Bed-Stuy for only a brief visit. Calvin, looking casually-sharp in a way that immediately ticks off Jean-Baptiste, has been able to avoid dealing with the police killing of an unarmed Black man they both knew. Calvin longs to get back in the good graces of Aisha (Alana Raquel Bowers), single mother and young widow of the slain man. Though none too pleased with Calvin either, the alternately sunny, bone-tired and volatile Aisha is susceptible. But her sister Adriana (Tanyamaria) carries the heaviest burden of all, a trauma she tries to conceal with good humor and toughness. Tries and repeatedly fails.

This quartet of skilled actors has energy to burn, particularly Bowers and Tanyamaria who, when they get going with their lines, leave us in the dust, hyperventilating, unable to catch up. Of all, even Jean-Baptiste, Inoa gives the women the best language. But all actors turn on extraordinary ferocity in the final, disturbing developments of the story, which I will not reveal here.

Where Sibblies Drury concluded Fairview with a panoramic view of white privilege, boldly implicating her audience, Inoa maintains focus on the tragedy of unhealed racial trauma passed from generation to generation.

Other cast members: Andrew Baldwin, Bryn Carter

Sets: Ao Li
Costumes: Andy Jean
Lighting: Kate McGee
Sound: Megan Deets Culley
Violence choreography: Michael G. Chin

Scraps continues at The Flea through September 24. For information and tickets, click here.

The Flea Theater
20 Thomas Street, 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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Soon-Tek Oh, 85

Soon-Tek Oh, Actor Who Chafed at Asian Stereotypes, Dies at 85
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, April 25, 2018

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Davalois Fearon and the politics of race in dance

Davalois Fearon in Time to Talk
(photo: ANDREW IMAGING)

Sometimes, there's the story you intend to tell, and then there's the unintended story you wind up telling.

Davalois Fearon--a powerful dancer acclaimed for her many years with Stephen Petronio--has struck out on her own. In recent years, she has developed earnest multimedia pieces like Consider Water (2017) and the new Time to Talk, running this week at Mabou Mines. The background of Time to Talk--Fearon's literature cites research in "American history, dance history, racial identity formation and systemic racism"--has yielded a work that slightly gestures at the toxicity of these massive, interlocking entities. It hovers around what it means to train, professionally perform and be seen and critiqued performing dance in a Black body. And we know that's what the Jamaica-born Fearon has done exceptionally well--the irony of the piece being that you readily see she's a woman who excels at whatever she sets her mind to doing. Her supple, sculptural, forceful body is equipped to ace every form of movement--from ballet barre to twerking--even when built-in, exaggerated imperfections show she's unhappy and unfulfilled by the expectations that others put on her.

There's the distraction of her mastery, a mastery undercut by only partially-disguised misery and resentment. I get it. But the main story it's actually telling me--and underscoring any number of times--is the familiar one about how Black people take whatever's available to us and make it shine like the sun. We've been doing that from way back and do it still. And then other people copy what we've done, often profiting from it.

With prompting and accompaniment from her husband, jazz musician Mike McGinnis, Fearon makes various attempts to find the right genre of dance that's "appropriate" for her to do. As an interracial couple, they seem to have mined their own situation and conversations for material. Unfortunately, this creates some imbalance: He's an accomplished artist in his own right but not an actor; his awkwardness, when not working a sax or clarinet, weakens their interactions and gives Time to Talk an amateurish feel. I believe their good intentions, though, and I believe they need still more time to nurture depth, breadth and incisiveness in the work.

Fearon cites her Jamaican upbringing as a shield from racism. She experienced colorism in the Caribbean, for sure, but admits it was only when she entered grad school at a Midwestern university, a few years ago. that she discovered what Blacks face in the US on the regular. Her experiences in Milwaukee shocked her.

Fearon's aims to spark audience dialogue and follows each performance with a talkback with McGinnis and guests. Last evening, she included representatives from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. I counted just a few Black people in the room--including myself and Fearon's own understudy. It was disheartening to hear no one actually acknowledge the systemic nature of American racism (not just how people getting to know one another better will cure things). It also made me tired to hear most of the talking--at great length and intensity--issuing from white men.

But, again, the story you didn't intend to tell is sometimes the one that rolls out even so.

Time to Talk continues through Thursday, March 29 with performances at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here. For tickets by phone call 212-352-0255 or 1-866-811-4111.

Mabou Mines Theater
150 1st Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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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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Robert Guillaume, 89

Robert Guillaume, Emmy-Winning Star of ‘Benson,’ Dies at 89
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, October 24, 2017

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Barbara Smith Conrad, 79

Barbara Smith Conrad, Singer at Center of Integration Dispute, Dies at 79
by William Grimes, The New York Times, May 24, 2017

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Lea Marshall: Who--and what--reinvigorates ballet?

Dance writer and educator Lea Marshall
(photo: courtesy of Lea Marshall)

Guest contributor Lea Marshall responds to New York Times dance writer Roslyn Sulcas's conversation with three contemporary ballet choreographers--Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon (April 20, 2017).

*****

Open Letter to The New York Times

on the Memorable Occasion of 

“A Conversation With Three Choreographers 

Who Are Reinvigorating Ballet.”

by guest contributor Lea Marshall

Monday morning, when I opened my weekly ArtsJournal emailed roundup of dance articles from around the web, I knew better than to click on the title above. I knew better, but I clicked anyway. And then I posted the piece on Facebook with the comment, “Huh. Three white men. Imagine.”

The image alone was enough.  You wouldn’t even have to read the piece to understand whose voices are most valued in ballet today, according to the Times. There they are, all in a row: Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon--three white men.

Under my Facebook post, a friend asked: “Lea, not being into the dance scene like you, and acknowledging the racist and sexist nature of the article, if you had written this article, who would you have included?”

In response, I realized I wanted to dismantle the whole premise of the article and start over. Editors, the problem lies not just with ballet, but with you.

If we’re presented with this question--“Which choreographers have reinvigorated ballet?”--and the answer we come up with is “These three white male choreographers,” we must re-examine the question. What does it mean to “reinvigorate ballet”? Obviously, in this equation it doesn’t mean taking dramatic steps toward diversity, or critically thinking about ballet’s de facto position at the “top” of our white, western, racist, sexist, popular cultural understanding of what dance is. Rather, it appears that in this context to “reinvigorate” means to make dances that seem fresh and appeal to the tired eye of the Eurocentric or Balanchine-worshiping balletomane.

Of course these choreographers make great work. But the context for that work demands examination and discussion. Sulcas actually asks the men why more women don’t hold “major choreographer” status in ballet. For the most part, their answers are laughably inadequate.

So, let’s change the whole question so that the answer includes Dance Theatre of Harlem; includes Misty Copeland, Michaela DePrince, Yuan Yuan Tan; includes American Ballet Theatre's Project Plié’s goal to diversify American ballet companies; includes Ballez (performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer and transgender people). New York Times, you can do so much better.

Throughout the day after the piece appeared, a great flurry arose that focused in large part on the choreographers’ responses to that question about women. But the problem, as I’d hope we all realize, extends far past the privileged men; it’s with the system that privileges them, including the Times.

There’s an easy fix for this article, as a start. Change the headline to: “Privileged Positions: Three White Male Choreographers Get Extra Credit in Ballet.”

*****

Lea Marshall is Associate Chair of the Department of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a dance writer, critic and poet. She writes for Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher and Richmond’s Style Weekly.

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Re-membering Black lives with Taja Lindley

This Ain’t A Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering (9:58) is a stunning film by Brooklyn-based visual and performance artist Taja Lindley, based on her solo healing performance ritual This Ain't A Eulogy (premiere: La MaMa's SQUIRTS, 2015). Co-directed with and edited by Ellen Maynard, the film was premiered on February 16 at the 5th Annual Black Artstory Month (Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership).

The film draws "parallels between discarded materials and the violent treatment of Black people in the United States," Lindley writes. "People in the African Diaspora have a long history of repurposing, remixing, and transforming oppressive systems into valuable cultural practices." Through the surreal, eye-catching artistry of her film, Lindley invites the viewer to "imagine how we can recycle the energy of protest, rage, and grief into creating a world where, indeed, Black Lives Matter."

Taja Lindley

Taja Lindley is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the founder and Managing Member of Colored Girls Hustle, and a member of Echoing Ida and Harriet's Apothecary. Lindley considers herself a healer and an activist, creating socially engaged work that reflects and transforms audiences, shifts culture and moves people to action. She uses movement, text, installation, props, ritual, burlesque, and multi-media to create performances that are concerned with freedom, healing and pleasure. She is currently developing a body of work recycling and repurposing discarded materials. Her artwork has been featured at the Movement Research at Judson Church series, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), the Gallatin Arts Festival at New York University, WOW Café Theater, La Mama Theater, in living rooms, classrooms, conferences and public spaces. In 2014 she was a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project and a participant in EMERGENYC, an artist activist program of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. In 2015 she was a Fall space grantee at BAX. This summer (May-August 2017) she is an Artist in Residence at Dixon Place. Her writing has appeared in Rewire, EBONY, Feministe, Yes! Magazine and Salon. www.TajaLindley.com

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William Melvin Kelley, 79

William Melvin Kelley, Who Explored Race in Experimental Novels, Is Dead at 79
by William Grimes, The New York Times, February 8, 2017

Tyrus Wong, 106

Tyrus Wong, ‘Bambi’ Artist Thwarted by Racial Bias, Dies at 106
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, December 30, 2016

E. R. Braithwaite,104

E. R. Braithwaite, Author of ‘To Sir, With Love,’ Dies at 104

by Sewell Chan, The New York Times, December 13, 2016

Mattiwilda Dobbs, 90

Mattiwilda Dobbs, Black Soprano and Principal at Met, Dies at 90
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, December 10, 2015

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)

Fight fire with fire: Byrd's "The Minstrel Show Revisited"

Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater
in The Minstrel Show Revisited
Below, l-r:
Fausto Rivera, Alex Crozier and Alexis "Tilly" Evans-Krueger
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The black-faced mask of minstrel shows is a lingering image from America's past that still inflicts wounds today through its psychic hold...In the future if we are to be free from its terrible grip we must confront it boldly and courageously by staring back into its face and laughing at the absurdity of its representation until it no longer has the power to hurt us. Only then will it be vanquished and we are free to be. -- Donald Byrd

You might have thought Donald Byrd would bury the tough stuff somewhere down inside The Minstrel Show Revisited and gradually ease you into it. But this dance-theater piece--sourced in Byrd's provocative 1991 Bessie-winner, The Minstrel Show--opens with the problem right before your eyes: a white male dancer singing that classic rag, "A Hot Time in the Old Town," in blackface and Afro wig. It doesn't ease anything when more blackfaced dancers from Byrd's multiracial Spectrum Dance Theater join in--peppy entertainers whose high kicks and high jinks, tumbling and sexy hip-pumping establish a through-line from 19th Century minstrelsy to today's musical theater.

In the program for The Minstrel Show Revisited's run at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Byrd reprinted Scott Delahunta's essay for the original production. Delahunta argues that stereotypes are a survival mechanism, making complexity less challenging and reality less threatening. They worked for white Americans faced with an African population they could no longer define and claim as property. They still work, today, for white Americans faced with the looming prospect of no longer being the majority group in this country. And that's just for starters.

Rather than shrink from mindless and noxious stereotyping, Byrd wallows in it for the sake of doing exactly what popular entertainment is not supposed to do--hold a merciless mirror up to the people who have paid to be distracted from problems. "We like to laugh, to cry and not have to 'think too much' and in doing so we become complicitous in the process of stereotyping," Delahunta wrote. Thus the tension in The Minstrel Show Revisited. The choreography and performances are skillful and dynamic. But, if you pay close attention, you become aware of how hollow and shallow the stage picture, for all its activity, looks and feels.

Over the course of the hour, Byrd's dancers not only dance a lot but also line up to tell an alarming number of offensive jokes aimed at a diversity of targets. But reworking 1991 also gives Byrd the chance to open the piece to audience participation, inviting several folks up on stage to tell the last racist joke they heard. (When I saw it, most of his volunteers happened to be youngish people of color.) This strategy encourages the watcher's Inner Performer to come out and play. It's safe, and it's not safe. It's bad...but it's permitted.

How will the volunteers respond to that invitation? How will the rest of us--sitting not so safely in our chairs--respond to what we're about to hear?  It's complicated!

How quickly the volunteers learned just the right intonations and body language for their brief interaction with Byrd. How easily they remembered and told their jokes.

OMG! Look at all these people running around with offensive jokes in their heads! And what was the last offensive joke I heard?

We giggled some because the tellers were cute and brave, and we knew they didn't mean what they said. It felt okay--sort of. That is, until the final and truly cringe-making one, which--whoa!--brought everybody up short.

And even then Byrd wasn't finished with us. He looked out over the house and urged people in the seats to write down a stereotypical joke to be collected and used later. Since I did not stay for the post-show Q&A--the theater seemed unusually tardy in getting it started--I can't say how that worked out.

In his pre-show talk, Awam Amkpa (NYU Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis) noted, "Art does not just reflect culture; it makes it." Byrd accepts his responsibility, as artist and entertainer, to highlight how the arts have served to deliver, spotlight and perpetuate stereotypes, making them not only useful but seductive and addictive. His work work offers no solution but a tap on the shoulder: Now, your turn.

Closed.

For more information on Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater, click here.

For information on upcoming events at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, click here.

Company Cypher to open Katrina-themed play, September 24

Company Cypher announces the New York City premiere of award-winning Gutting, written by Jeremy J. Kamps and directed by Zoey Martinson. The play, inspired by events in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, addresses issues of gentrification and displacement.

When fourteen-year-old Kali returns home to New Orleans after spending two years as a Katrina refugee in Baton Rouge, she finds the neighborhood where she grew up to be changed almost beyond recognition.

Company Cypher’s non-profit work, dedicated to transforming the conversation about skin tone prejudice and race, goes beyond producing theater. Just as important as the show, our aim is to engage communities in conversation and direct action inspired by the production. To that end, Company Cypher’s Gutting and The Center for the Living City’s ‘Jane Jacobs Walk’ have launched an initiative that will engage community stakeholders in a conversation around urban development, displacement and the growing changes of local communities through a series of free neighborhood walking tours that help to put people in touch with their environment. 

See Gutting, September 24-26 and October 1-3: Thursdays-Saturdays at 7pm with additional afternoon matinees on Saturdays at 2pm.

Selected performances are followed by talkbacks with creative team and invited community leaders. Please check out the website for the full schedule. 

Tickets may be purchased at the door as well as online at gutting2015.org. Presales are highly recommended. For more information please email guttinginfo@gmail.com

Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre

2031 Fifth Avenue (between 125th and 126th Streets), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Premiere by Marjani Forté & Works at Gibney Dance

Tendayi Kuumba in being Here.../this time
below, l-r: Kuumba, Jasmine Hearn and Ni'Ja Whitson
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Here's hoping you're one of the few people who will get to attend being Here…/this time, a new piece by Marjani Forté & Works. One of the few, because the space--Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Lab, the mixed-use studio right off the downtown center's lobby--seats so few. With a music and media station tucked into one corner and audience squeezed into two others, there's barely room for dancers to gallop through the middle. Yet they do. And how.

being Here.../this time concludes Marjani Forté-Saunders's unusual three-year project, a consideration of racial oppression, its resulting trauma and its consequences of poverty, mental illness and addiction. The work questions how we view these conditions and how our social policy has always, and quite deliberately, failed to confront them. A hefty load for dance, certainly, but Forté-Saunders does not bear it alone. Her accomplished team includes husband Everett Saunders (sound), Monstah Black (costumes), Wendell Cooper (media) and Howard Curry, who performs a pivotal voiceover as a good Christian advocate of slavery. Powerful dancers (Ni'Ja Whitson, Tendayi Kuumba and Jasmine Hearn) embody Forté-Saunders's Afrofuturistic aesthetic.

Tendayi Kuumba
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Forté-Saunders gulped when she first saw the space Gibney assigned to her, but limitation turned out to be her best friend. By compressing every element--us included--the tiny lab creates inescapable sensory immersion, as if the entire production takes place within one stressed body, one hallucinating mind. If you can walk out of this show feeling calm and unchanged, see your doctor.

After viewing a prelude out on Chambers Street and in the tiny lobby, audience members enter the studio, take seats and slip on headphones to hear Saunders's vivid 3-D soundscape. His choice splicing of voices, music and sound samples delivers information--sometimes disturbing or satirical, often loud--direct to one's ears and nervous system. There's no buffer, no mediation. Like Cooper's projections, and like the choreography, the sound shifts, and jerks us, from states of crystalline clarity to disorientation, from unnatural excitation to exhaustion. Black's costume design, too, fuses trash and beauty, the right partner for a dance channeling personae who flicker between states of mysterious and mystical nobility, belligerence, frantic struggle, and tenderness.

Kuumba (l) with Hearn
(photo: Alex Escalante)

The choreography--layered in complex, suggestive imagery--can buffet and distort the human body so that you wonder who's in charge. Maybe more than one driver, maybe not of this time or space but all being Here.../this time in this lab, in this pressure cooker, on this sacred and sacrificial altar.

Hearn (l) and Whitson
(photo: Alex Escalante)

being Here.../this time continues nightly through Saturday at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)