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Reading Zake: Vamo Hablar Ingles

by Ortiz 0 Comments

 

As I read for coloured girls by Shange, I was saddened by the idea that I hadn’t found her before. Before, when my curling hair and español didn’t fit in my mouth, didn’t fit in my writing, in my thoughts. When my own identity alienated me from my conceived self, a self that was white-passing (at least in South Jamaica, where white was just skin), and desired a white family and white traditions. As I read Shange, 21 and no longer desiring a white

identity, but desperately clinging to the aspects of my identity that are deeply Latina and give me culture, sabor at Barnard, I am deeply moved by her words. I annotated her work, as pictured, expressing the way my heart stopped when her stanzas did, or when it left me full of something unrecognizable – was it love for myself, or the people I identify with? Shange’s writing is not just feminist writing, it is not just transnational and globalized, it is not just about culture and music and movement, it is about humanity as its core. It is about empathy and love and passion, pain, and healing and for these reasons, for the shared experiences Shange expresses in for coloured girls¸ I am able to tie myself to a story that is not necessarily, explicitly my own.

we deal wit emotion too much

so why don’t we go on ahead & be white then/

& make everythin dry & abstract wit no rhythm & no

reelin for sheer sensual pleasure/ yes let’s go on & be white. (58-59)

— and I wanted to be white, for so long, because, as Shange expresses, maybe being white means not having to address the idea of the woman of color that is too sensitive, too concerned about herself. Maybe this was a way to remove myself from myself? But as Shange states, “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma / i havent conquered yet” (59). Haven’t conquered because I refuse to view myself as separate, fragmented pieces, at least not anymore.

Now, as I read other literary works, I search for myself. I don’t search for a regurgitated image of what others think I am, because I am too complicated, too sanctified, too magic, too music (60-61) to be one thing.

El español de Shange, the reference to the music of my childhood, merengue, immediately reminded me of Fefita’s performance of Vamo Hablar Ingles; watching as a woman dominate a stage, surrounded by music and movement and culture / my culture adopted a new meaning. A song that only in asserting to “hablar ingles” is adopting the same transnational, global connections that Shange evokes, and in a sense, it’s all tied together.

 

 

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 2: McIntyre’s Choreodrama

by Nicole 1 Comment

During my visit to the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, I looked at programs from the Sounds in Motion company. One of the more interesting programs was from an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

FullSizeRender
CAPTION: “Program from May 1987 interpretation of Their Eyes Were Watching God with choreography by Dianne McIntyre: This program is important because it shows how dance and literature can be combined to create a unique experience for the audience. For this performance, McIntyre also collaborated with The Okra Orchestra. In this performance, McIntyre did not only honor Zora Neale Hurston’s literature but also Southern black culture through a celebration of the blues. This performance recognized an experience that was particular to black culture.”

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.

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.”

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

Glissant’s Linguistic Analysis + Movement

by Melissa 1 Comment

Part of the struggle against a single-axis cultural and historical narrative lies in the contestation of power via language, or the creation of a new language marked by struggle against hegemonic paradigms of knowledge and subjectivity. Glissant asserts that a national literature, borne of the “urge for each group to assert itself” (Glissant 99), is an enactment of this struggle. A community goes in search of itself and its subjectivity by creating a literature that gives voice to its beliefs, its memories, its pains etc. In this literature, a new language emerges from the colliding forces of orality – which are, in the case of the Caribbean, found in the phonetics of resistance found in Creole – and the written forms of European languages. Glissant acknowledges a “forced poetics” faced by the Caribbean speaker (specifically by the Martinican) in encountering the tension between French and Creole.

Glissant defines the basis of Creole’s orality as located in the body. Creole mobilizes the body’s reproductive functions that allow African traditions to persist and reappear in the context of the Western Hemisphere, where they are perpetually carried in the body and consciousness of the Caribbean speaker. This logic of reproduction imbues the Black Caribbean body with the power of resistance, which is deployed in the making of national literature. Describing the nature of Creole as conceptual, Glissant is able to illustrate the ways in which linguistic orality is and does as music, in that it embodies collective resistance and is carried across temporal and corporeal bounds. Glissant’s explanations offer insight into the workings of the literary impulse as an alternative to the fragmentation and chaos of Black subjectivities. In giving voice to these suppressed and undermined subjectivities, literature creates the conditions for the persistence and expansion of Black expression.
“Shange’s multilingual poetry puts languages in Relation in order to encourage people to connect in the transnational web of Relation that Glissant envisions.” (Spyra 793). Ntozake Shange produces a national literature that transcends borders by linking languages in the Western Hemisphere. Shange’s work, specifically the choreopoem, is described as “‘an ancient African form’ enriched with influences from European experimental theater and dance” (786). This allows us to view the body and its movements as an extension of language and literature. Thus in Shange’s work we not only see the body reproducing timeless resistance through spoken and language, but also enacting forced poetics in its breath and movement. There is a continuous link then, between knowledge, language, and corporeality.

Sweat, Truth and Survival

by Clarke 0 Comments

In understanding physicality as the basis of Shange’s art, I realize that she equates dance with both truth and survival. In “why i had to dance//” Shange calls attention to a critical moment in her development: “when I decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, I had to sweat/ to reach some sort of endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time” (56). She recalls this relationship between sweat and truth in “movement/ melody/ muscle/ meaning/ mcintyre” as she elaborates on McIntyre’s work, committing dancers to “the rubrics of sound and sweat” and, by doing so, upholding a dance company “that does not lie” (62). These moments led me to ask, how does sweat lead to the truth?

Then, throughout the readings, Shange relates dance to the formation and maintenance of her afro-identity and consciousness, particularly in “a celebration of black survival/ black dance america/ brooklyn academy of music.” Here, she not only articulates how choreographers are addressing “the many ways we’ve avoided death, insisted on living,” (74) but also insists, “We must sing and dance or we shall die an inert, motionless, ‘sin ritmo’ death.” I have two additional questions: in what ways does Shange characterize truth and survival as “one”? What does Shange’s statement, “this would change over time” (56) add to our interpretation of truth and survival according to Shange?

Shange discusses her experience with dance, endorphins, and writing in the following video:

A Conversation with Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Man & Woman: Running Parallel to Each Other

by Yemi 1 Comment
Man & Woman: Running Parallel to Each Other
Language of African Theatre Rewrite - Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi

 

Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind — The Language of African Theatre

“Drama is closer to the dialectics of life than poetry and the fiction. Life is movement arising from the inherent contradiction and unity of opposites. Man and woman meet in a united dance of opposites out of which comes a human life separate from the two that gave it birth but incorporating features of both in such a way that it is recognizable at a glance that so and so is really product of so and so. The growth of that life depends on some cells dying and others being born (54).”

 

 Rewrite of Quote:

drama is clo/ser to the dialectics

of life than poetry/nd/ d fiction/

life is movement risin from d inherent contradiction nd unity of opposites/

man and woman

meet in a united dance of opposites/ out of which comes

 

a human life separate/

from d two that gave it birth/ but incorporating features of both/

in such a way that it is/ recognizable/

at a glance/

 

that so and so is really product of so and so

d growth of that life depends on som cells dying/ nd others being born

 

 

Rewriting the excerpt for Ngugi’s The Language in African Theatre was liberating. Breaking away from the structure of prose into a text that is more fluid deepened my understanding of the text. I created spaces of silence, so that as I read the text I could reflect on the words for a longer period of time. Using paragraph breaks at “/out of which comes” into “a human life” emphasized the literal meaning of the text. I could show how life would emerge on paper and through this the natural emergence of humans. Using slashes broke apart ideas that would normally be hard to digest. They also gave additionally pauses.

A change that I appreciate most is the shortening or contracting of words. I change the to “d.” I changed and to “nd” while also cutting off some letters to sharpen the intake and pronunciation of the words to give the reading beats that are easy to land on. It feels pleasant to drop those letters. It’s like getting rid of dead weight, like jumping into freedom and an alternative way of being. I also changed the visually display of the words to a form that could help me see how the author’s ideas spilled into and out of each other.

Moreover, Ngugi’s “The Language of African Theatre,” echoes many of Fanon’s gender sentiments in the chapter “Algeria Unveiled” of his A Dying Colonialism. Fanon says “This is why we must watch the parallel progress of this man and this woman, of this couple that brings death to the enemy, life to the revolution (57).”

His words provide a distinct way of organizing the ideas in the Ngugi quote . Man and woman running parallel to each other is similar to the way their dance is a dance of opposites. And the theme of life that emerges from two opposite individuals is consistent. Fanon highlights the differences between man and woman by touching on their societal roles, but the movement between the two – the curving, diving, shifting, spinning – shows the dynamic conversation that happens between to humans before birth.