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Week 2: “Physicality is the basis of my art”

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Archive Object: The original first page for “Why I Had to Dance” from Black Renaissance. Note how the letters seem to move. What is the effect of having the first line in boldface?

ASSIGNMENTS

  • Ntozake Shange, selections from A Daughter’s Geography (handout)
  • —– “getting to where I haveta be / the nature of collaboration in recent works” “why I had to dance,”  “movement/ melody/ muscle/ meaning/ mcintyre,” “a celebration of black survival/ black dance america/ Brooklyn academy of music/ April 21-24, 1983”  in Lost in Language and Sound
  • Selections from Jessica Hagedorn, Beauty and Danger. Pay particular attention to the introduction, either of the two “Autobiography” poems, “Canto De Nada” (16), “Pearl” (28) and “Something About You” (73).
  • “Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange“(11 mins) and “A Conversation with Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre” (1 hour) from “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange.” http://bit.ly/S-FZake
  • Clips from  Busby Berkeley‘s Wonderbar (in class)

 

Today is the beginning of a twofold journey of (1) learning to read Ntozake Shange’s work and (2)  learning more about the artistic and political friendships that shape her work. We will start with talking about movement. In a 2010 interview with Shange, critic Alexis Pate points to the many levels of Shange’s work: “It approaches you on multiple levels. Idea, language, music, movement, memory, action.” (Black Renaissance 10.2/3 (Summer 2010).  Shange herself told previous classes that “physicality” is at the basis of her art, so we need to have some conversation about what that means.

For 1, I assigned for today some videos that hopefully give you some tips on how to read the printed page as performance along with the choreoessays from Lost in Language and Sound; or how I found my way to the arts: essays (LLS) that to me seemed most clearly to speak to the role of dance in her life and art )most particularly  “Why I Had to Dance”)  What does it mean to think capaciously about “movement”? Towards the end of “Why I Had to Dance,” Shange says, “It is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture.”  How do gesture/movement and the spoken text work together?
For 2, I gave you selections from Filipina writer and performance artist Jessica Hagedorn who was an early friend and collaborator. What do you learn about San Francisco in the 1970s from her introduction? How does it gibe with Shange’s description of that era in the video?  Pay particular attention to the two “Autobiography” poems, “Canto De Nada” (16), “Pearl” (28) and “Something About You” (73).  You’ll find both Hagedorn’s and Shange’s work rich with musical, literary and real world allusion. How would you characterize their use of description and music?  How do they use paratext?
It would interrupt your reading experience to look up all of the allusions, but you should get into the habit of investigating some of them.  In an earlier reading, I decided to look up Busby Berkeley, because I had a vague childhood memory of the trailers from his musicals.

The Busby Berkeley dance numbers I remember were entrancing and overwhelming. I don’t know if as a kid (by then his time had passed–just how old do you think I am?) I noticed how really heteronormative (a key element of musicals themselves) the musicals were. So too, I probably didn’t notice how much of the glamour was linked to classic notions of femininity and to the angelic glow that Richard Dyer sees as constitutive of cinematic whiteness. Now that impression is so overwhelming, I just can’t shake it.  The first question for me then became: how did Shange incorporate into a diasporic consciousness something that seems to exclude the possibility of color: in her own words, “how did i jump over the fact of their whiteness and my very brown-ness” (LLS 51)? How does she move from Hollywood spectacle/Euro-“American” tradition to something that is more diasporic?
In Dianne McIntyre’s choreography of the essay (which I’m sorry I couldn’t acquire for you), the dancers move about using white cloth–the motion mimicking the flowing costumes of a Berkeley number (and perhaps that black girls’ childhood game of using sheets and towels to pretend to have flowing white hair.) McIntyre’s dancers move through Berkeley-inspired movements to the more intimate movements of home and family, Shange’s parents dancing, the dances of home and community. If Berkeley plays on a Manichean contrast of white/black, Shange shows the diaspora as a space whose dynamism merges things that superficially seem contradictory or oppositional:
my mother was not only blonde at that time/ but she could dance/ and carried herself with aplomb and a flirtatiousness that was at the core of the berkeley chorus girl.
The beauty, poise and femininity the Berkeley chorus claims as an attribute of whiteness becomes something Shange can claim through a vision of her mother who is both “black” and blonde and through parents who travel throughout the diaspora to supply the sounds and movement that become the grounds for a black/diasporic aesthetic.
Looking at the Busby Berkeley routines though Shange’s essays, I see power and virtuosity, which his dancers convey through order and precision. The individual dancer’s prowess is amplified–but also subsumed by–monumental scale, architectural sets and technical innovation. In McIntyre’s choreography, we see the same values of power and virtuosity, but this time rendered through a diversity of movement and bodies.  (As you know from the video, the dancers and the choreographers meticulously research allusions in the choreoessays.) The Dancers take you through a dizzying array of black/African dance movements, from colloquial dances like the shimmy & the Charleston to the signature moves of Tina Turner and the Ikettes, to the more formal, technical artistry of Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre and Alvin Ailey.  Blackness and black movement is multi-racial, its dynamism coming, not from perfectly choreographed order, but from a capacious and chaotic sense of history, space and time which gives everyone a place through which to enter.
Perhaps this is what the movement does/means: it collapses the distance between the reader and the text. When watching a Berkeley routine, I sit there in awe; “Why I had to Dance,” invites you dance yourself.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Don’t forget about the Cherríe Moraga reading/conversation on Thursday.  If you can, go, even if you haven’t registered.

Archive Find 1: “why i had to dance”

by Nicole 1 Comment
This program is from a theater production of Ntozake Shange’s essay “why i had to dance,” choreographed and directed by Dianne McIntyre. In Ntozake Shange’s essay “why i had to dance” she demonstrates the importance of dance not only to the preservation and exploration of black culture, but also to the creative process of writing. In a mix of poetry and prose she speaks to her experiences with dance and how it came to be an integral part of her writing process. This production of the piece took place at Oberlin College in 2012.

This program is from a theater production of Ntozake Shange’s essay “why i had to dance,” choreographed and directed by Dianne McIntyre. In Ntozake Shange’s essay “why i had to dance” she demonstrates the importance of dance not only to the preservation and exploration of black culture but also to the creative process of writing. In a mix of poetry and prose, she speaks to her experiences with dance and how it came to be an integral part of her writing process. This production of the piece took place at Oberlin College in 2012.

 

My plan was to go to the Shange archives to look specifically for a program from one of Dianne’s productions with Shange, but I was lucky that Professor Hall happened to bring such a program to class. I was able to scan this item in class and, therefore, was able to investigate the item more thoroughly on my own time.

decolonizing the diet

by Sophia 0 Comments

The first chapter of If I Can Cook / You Know God Can addresses the effects of food’s presence and absence. When there is a shortage of food, the first efforts made are simply to nourish —in any way possible, as soon as possible. Efforts made to eliminate food insecurity, whether within in the United States or outside of it, almost always move away from native culinary traditions, as the cultural associations that they carry are intimately tied with infrastructures that created and propagated the insecurity in the first place. In other words, attempts to eliminate hunger inevitably lead to the elimination (if merely inadvertent) of culinary traditions personally associated with it. That it is inadvertent is critical; the pain of hunger is urgent, fundamental, and quickly becomes a matter of life or death with the passage of time. The general condition of food insecurity carries with it its own urgency; even if not hungry in a given moment, there remains the looming possibility that one might be thrust into that life-or-death-condition at any time, and be dramatically inhibited from meeting the demands of daily life —the meeting of all of which and more are necessary for the removal of one/one’s family from this position of precarity.
So with this in mind, no one —those who find their home in ‘American food’ and those who don’t— thinks to consider the health lost in the abandonment of native food traditions, and the possibilities of food beyond essential daily calorie replenishment and into realms of spiritual healing, unity within and across cultures, and ritual acts of decolonization. Shange wonders
“if the move to monolignualize this country is a push for the homogeneity of our foods as well. Once we read American will e cease to recognize ourselves, our delicacies and midnight treats?” (5)
Food serves a deeper need than physical nourishment, even when focusing on physical nourishment is all we can afford. Just as African-Americans in Philadelphia hesitated to celebrate the American Declaration of Liberation while the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, they especially hesitated to do so with potato salad and golden or blanched flesh melon.
In support of the contemporary social justice project to “decolonize your diet,” Native American activist Winona LaDuke emphasizes that
“The recovery of the people is tied to recovery of food, since food itself is medicine—not only for the body but also for the soul and spiritual connection to history, ancestors, and the land.”
In this way, as Shange articulates,
“black-eyed peas and rice or ‘Hoppin John,’ even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the ‘nigra’ as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us” (6-7).
Even those who are fed —the slaves no longer slaves— are provided food historically tied to victories of their oppressors. Even those who are fed are still hungry for food whose history and semiotics is their own.
She quotes Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” to explain this.
“Dem belly full, but dey hungry/ A hungry man is an angry man.”
The popular interpretation of this is a warning against allowing Jamaica’s poor to go hungry —which is certainly not untrue. But here Shange uses it to better articulate the deeper hunger that remains even after the little Hatian girl eats every one of the cookies in the red-lettered American box. The song asks the listener to forget their troubles, sorrows, sickness, and weakness through dance, which, like cooking, is a personal, pluralizing, and culturally-motivated strategy by which to reclaim the body.

Shange says Dance! Shange says Write! Keep on pushing on

by Yemi 1 Comment

When Ntozake Shange came to class we had the privilege of the archivist, the scholar, and the creator all in one room. We had someone to guide us through the materials, we had the written work, we had our own motivation to learn, but most importantly we had the living spring, the touchstone to which we could understand, the body to which we could trace back years of experience and extrapolate an abundance of meaning. With this dynamic it seemed like we could solve all problems and address all nuances of the black experience that may have once slipped by us.

Ntozake Shange in front of Barnard gates (10/23/15)

Ntozake Shange in front of Barnard gates (10/23/15)

… (Reflections) … (continue) … (below) …

Much of Shange’s defiance of the Black Arts Movement was because it was for “macho males.” In a similar way she went to alternative dance teachers spaces and because she wanted to learn a dance “other than yoruba.” How did Shange choose which movements to be a part of? Which dance to dance? Was the nature of her defiance simply to move against the grain in every way? I had always wondered about the strategy of rejection and how refusal would effect politics and thus effect history. Shange answered my questions and unearthed the meaning behind her actions by explaining: “When you accept something/ don’t accept, it controls the historical narrative.”

Refusing the Black Arts Movement was a fight for women to not only be considered, but to be recognized as essential to the progress of any black agenda. Learning dances outside of Yoruba, meant that countries which fell outside the demarcations of West Africa could be represented in America and more importantly in the New World, which housed many nations and black aesthetics, that Shange was creating.

The purpose of arts, dance and writing, is to use individual creativity to get to a place where “we [the black collective] can restructure and reconstitute the universe” to be one that is inclusive of us. That is why Shange challenges African Americans to pick up another language, so we are not defaulting to the language of the oppressor. “When you take control of the language, you take control of your life.”

The Spyra piece describes Shange’s Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter and the way in which purposefully using language is an act of distancing one’s self from the historical narrative of slavery and the chains that identify the black body and black life as without form or distinction: “there’s no words for us (Spyra, 765).” In the same way that language breaks the historical narrative, so does dance. Though Shange distances herself from Yoruba dance because it only upholds one African cultural group, the fact that the dance appears in Black American culture is a victory. The distance between continent of origin and the diaspora is closing. The gap of okra and greens becomes tighter. The arts bridges continents and claims a trajectory of history that was stolen. In this video Shange defines black dance as “how we remember what cannot be said.”

Revelations on Carnal Intellectuality

by Nadia 1 Comment

Shange’s visit gave me to the opportunity to ask her questions and connect the dots between ideas I have been developing throughout the semester. I was able to address issues I have been struggling with in my previous blog posts. These issues included questions Professor Hall and Tiana had in response to my blog post “Dance: as a means of survival and a revelation of truth” which was a response to Clarke’s blog post “Sweat, Truth and Survival.”  They asked,

“What kinds of truth does the body contain that aren’t as accessible in other ways?”

&

“What  does truth mean (in my, Clarke or Shange’s  writing)?”

I wrote my previous blog post in an attempt to understand why and how dance is so central to Shange’s work as a writer. I started to gain a greater understanding of Shange’s idea of truth when I asked her what the relationship was between dancing and cooking. I noted that she writes about cooking in From Okra To Greens as a mode for survival and self-preservation in a similar way to which she writes about dance in her other works.

I particularly observed this in the way in which she talks about cooking in “From Okra to Greens / A Different Love Poem / We Need a Change.” In  this poem she writes:

i lived in her kitchen/ wit greens i cd recollect

yes the very root of  myself

In response to my question, Shange said that cooking and dance are connected to her because both allow her to participate in a tradition of people of color that has existed for centuries and therefore, allows her to feel connected to people of color throughout time and throughout the world.

I began to understand the centrality of dance as I marveled at how dance, for Shange, cannot be separated from anything else in her life. Even in her discussion about cooking she mentioned that she dances in the kitchen while cooking. For Shange, the completion of a thought cannot be expressed in words, but rather is completed with a gesture. While writing, she dances in her seat to the tapping of the keys or to the rhythm of the music she is listening to. Shange’s response reminded me of her concept of carnal intellectuality which is a way of knowing that can only be processed, understood, and expressed through the body. Therefore, truth for Shange may have less to do with what is said, but rather what is felt and experienced.

movement and memories in the archival effort

by Melissa 1 Comment

When we defined the archive as a space wherein materials could be preserved for their enduring value, I wondered how the imagination and vitality of literature as it is produced in the human body, spoken language, and patterns of sociality could be preserved in its full essence. For me, the question arose: what is the function of the archive and how does it mirror, encompass, and fall short of the world-making possibilities offered by literature?

I have been thinking about literature as an expansive concept, one that transcends linguistic bounds and regulations. I have also been conceptualizing literature per Shange’s notion of carnal intellectuality, whereby stories and histories are articulated and constantly re-formed via the body’s motions in concert with human imagination. Memories for example, are part of a reproductive effort by the body, and can lend themselves to the archival process.

In literature, I find that there are endless possibilities for struggle against normativity and linearity in our narratives. The fragmented pieces of history take shape in the imaginative realm of literature, allowing for the reconfiguration of our realities and conceptions of self. How then is the archival effort able to encompass literature, and its malleable impulses? Only in thinking of the archive as functioning within the body through motions such as carnal intellectuality, am I able to understand the ways in which language, movement, and the imagination produce archival knowledge.

Shange’s work brings attention to the ways in which the Black woman’s body is shaped by the labor of the archival effort. I found a clip of Ntozake Shange reading from a piece titled “What Does it Mean That Black Folks Can Dance”. The poem conveys the notion of the moving body as a carrier of knowledge, collective sorrows/joys, and the memories that make up Black historical narratives. Here, dance is “how we remember what cannot be said”. The body takes up motion and mobility to recall, to create, and to transcend.

crooked woman/okra meets greens in strange circumstances
the woman dont stand up
straight
aint never stood up
straight/ always bent
some which a way
crooked turned abt
slanted sorta toward a shadow of herself

Alvin Ailey, BAM and Shange

by Nicole 1 Comment

I am really interested in Alvin Ailey’s ballet, Revelations, which Shange mentions in “why I had to dance” in Lost in Language and Sound. Growing up it was a tradition between my mother and I to go see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater each year around Christmas when they perform at City Center. My mother would always choose a performance date on which they would be performing Revelations. Even before I was able to understand the importance of the ballet, I was aware that something about this piece in particular was sacred to many black dancers and black people who enjoy dance.

Suturing the rifts within our narratives

by Melissa 2 Comments

For Shange, the dramatic text serves to engender collectivity by mapping out social relations that counter normative constitutions of sociality and by establishing a differential mode of collectivity and group sovereignty. “The touching that opens and closes the drama creates links across and between the individual poems, enabling individual innovation and expression within collectivity.” (Colbert). The bodies through which touch is transmitted are mobilizing new patterns of relationality that descend from traditions fostered among Black women in the interest of healing from and resisting violence.  The choreopoem departs from the idealized white body though a narrative that reasserts Black subjectivity/humanity through the intimacy of touch.

The ways in which pain and sorrow shift and are molded into joy and vice versa through dance, touch, collective relationality creates a fluidity of emotion that mirrors the unstable patterns of racialization and gendering from which Black womanhood emerges. The inherently unstable and wavering aspects of Black identity are informed by the constantly changing and evolving needs of an imperialist, settler-colonialist state. The state’s reliance upon Black women’s bodies to re-establish its power and sovereignty demands an ever-shifting motion and (re)formation of Black women’s placement within complex patterns of social relation. Black women operate within these fluid and unstable networks to make meaning of their own subjective realities. We make use of the inherently contradictory aspects of the individual and collective self to suture the rifts and fragments of our narratives.

Black Arts Movement Notes

by Nicole 0 Comments

Black Arts Movement Notes 

 

Who are the main players of the black arts movement? 

  • Amiri Baraka (poet) is considered the father of the movement
  • Baraka was “highly visible publisher, a celebrated poet, a major music critic, and an Obie award winning playwright.”
  • Larry Neal was an African American theater scholar who worked with Baraka to open the Black Arts Repertory Theater School.

How did it begin, how long did it last? 

  • It lasted from 1965-1975
  • “emerged in the wake of the black power movement”
  • The movement born after the assassination of Malcolm X on 2/21/1965
  • people divided between Political Nationalism (Black Panther Movement) and Cultural Nationalism
  • Baraka’s symbolic move from the Lower East Side to Harlem in March of 1995.
  • Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) that year.
  • Before Malcom X’s assassination Baraka lived successfully in an integrated community.
  • The black arts movement was inspired by the Umbra Workshop, which was a group of young black writers on the Lower East Side. Another group at the time was the Harlem Writers Guild which included Maya Angelou, but the fact “that Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement’s aesthetics.”
  • When Baraka moved back to New Jersey BARTS fell apart but the ideals remained.

What are the main ideologies and goals of the group? 

  • Cultural Nationalism called for the creation of black poetry, literature, theater and visual arts that represented black culture and history. The “autonomy of black artists” was emphasized.
  • Larry Neal says it is the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”
  • Some of the main concepts came from RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) which was a national organization popular in New York. Larry Neal was a member of this group.
  • There also was an organization called US (as opposed to “them’) led by Maulana Karenga
  • Elijah Muhammad’s Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

Where was its locus and what other areas did it reach? 

  • BAM began in the New York area but spread to Detroit (Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett’s Lotus Press), Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World and Third World Press ) and San Francisco (Journal of Black Poetry, the Black Scholar).

What is the legacy of the Black Arts Movement? 

  • The Black arts movement is inventive in its use of language and communication (performance, music and actual speech).
  • “Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience.”
  • “I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that,” (Ishmael Reed, 1995).

 

Dance: A means of survival and a revelation of truth

by Nadia 2 Comments

I really like Clarke’s question in her blog post “Sweat, Truth and Survival:“In what ways does Shange characterize truth and survival as “one”?” There are probably several lenses through which one could tackle this question and here I will attempt to offer one.

In the readings we have done thus far, dance is key for liberation of the black woman and Shange’s choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” continues to express this idea.

In the first poem “dark phases,” Shange shows the importance of giving women a voice and the opportunity to be heard. Not only does Shange give voice to the “dark phases of womanhood/ of never having been a girl” (17), but she also encourages the audience to be intimate with the woman’s story, to “sing her rhythms/ carin/ struggle/ hard times. sing her song of life” (18). As the audience becomes familiar with the woman’s song, so does the woman herself who has “been dead so long/ closed in silence so long/ she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice/ her infinite beauty” (18). As for colored girls progresses, one discovers that the woman’s voice dwells in her body.

Soyica Diggs Colbert’s article “Black Feminist Collectivity in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls…” talks about how black women’s bodies are sexualized and demonized. However, she goes on to say, “Rather than trying to assimilate into a system of desire that diminishes the shape of the black woman, Shange suggests that in order to find her voice she needed to accept her body. Dance was part of the process of moving toward acceptance.”

More than self-acceptance, dance is a means of survival.

“we gotta dance to keep from cryin/ we gotta dance to keep from dyin” (29)

“there is no me but dance/ & when i can dance like that/ there’s nothing that cd hurt me” (57)

Dance is a revelation of truth because it embodies a woman’s very essence, which is something that cannot be fully expressed in words. The lady in purple says “to come wit you/ i hadta bring everything/ the dance & the terror” (58). “[the lady in green] is Sechita and for the rest of the poem dances out Sechita’s life” (37), revealing the goddess of creativity and love through movement.

Dance also reveals truth because it makes up for the limitations of language. Dance, unlike spoken language, has the ability to live in silence, in “melody-less-ness” (17).

So, how does Shange characterize truth and survival as ”one”? She does this by showing dance is survival and dance reveals the truth. However, a question I would like to explore in future blog posts is, “What is truth for us as readers and for Shange?”