Music – The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling

Reading Zake: Vamo Hablar Ingles

by Ortiz on October 30, 2019 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”

Classes

by Kim Hall on September 12, 2018 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 on April 5, 2016 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.

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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.”

announcements

by Kim Hall on December 14, 2015 0 Comments

From Ellington Was Not A Street, a children’s book based on the “Mood Indigo” poem in *A Daughter’s Geography*. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson.

Hi all,

While you described your future projects, I suggested some books that might be helpful for you. Given the library/archive move, I’ve placed these books in a box in the Barnard Center For Research on Women (BCRW) for informal loan. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF MY BOOKS. Some of them I’ve had for 20+ years and others are just difficult to get. Most of you might find Neal Lester’s Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays useful. It is very thoroughly documented and the bibliography/notes might lead you to some interesting primary sources. There are several books on Black Women’s Health and the Black Arts Movement. (FYI, I am also loading items in our group Zotero folder as I find things that are related to your project.)

Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst, eds. SOS/Calling All Black People : A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

Clarke, Cheryl. “After Mecca” : Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2005.

Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Nathalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2006.

hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam : Black Women and Self-Recovery. Boston, MA: South End Press, c1993.

Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays /. New York : Garland Pub., 1995.

Shange, Ntozake. Coretta Scott. New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2011.

———. Ellington Was Not a Street. 1 edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2004.

———. Freedom’s a-Callin Me. New York: Amistad, 2012.

———. Lost in Language and Sound: Or, How I Found My Way to the Arts; Essays (audio Book). Unabridged edition. North Kingstown, RI: AudioGO, 2012.

———. The Sweet Breath of Life : A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family. New York: Atria Books, 2004.

———. We Troubled the Waters. New York: Amistad, 2009.

Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement : Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c2005.

Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon : The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1992.

Villarosa, Linda, ed. Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

White, Evelyn, ed. The Black Women’s Health Book : Speaking for Ourselves. Seattle, Wash: Seal, c1994.

decolonizing the diet

Uncategorized

by Sophia on December 10, 2015 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.

Outsiders: Uncle John’s Wisdom

by Nicole on November 12, 2015 2 Comments

“Them whites what owned slaves took everythin’ was ourselves & didn’t even keep it fo’ they own selves. Just threw it on away, ya heah. Took the drums what they could, but they couldn’t take our feet. Took them languages what we speak…But the fiddle was the talkin’ one. The fiddle be callin’ our gods what left us/be givin’ back some devilment & hope in our bodies worn down & lonely over these fields & kitchens. Why white folks so dumb, they was thinkin’ that if we didn’t have nothin’ of our own, they could come controllin’, meddlin’, whippin’ our sense on outta us. But the Colored smart, ya see. The Colored got some wits to em, you & me, we ain’t the onliest ones be talkin’ wit the unreal. What ya think music is, whatchu think the blues be, & them get happy church musics is about, but talkin’ with the unreal what’s mo’ real than most folks ever gonna know.”

(Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, pg. 22-23).

I find that often in literature the people who are outcasts and considered outside of society’s bounds are the most insightful. It is interesting that Indigo has the most thoughtful and honest conversation with an adult who is somewhat outside of the community because he is eccentric and lives outdoors. Uncle John is able to speak freely to Indigo despite her age because he separated from normal society. He is honest with Indigo about what it means that black people must take advantage of other modes of communication and expression. Indigo’s mother adores her and does her best to protect her but she wants to shelter her child instead of providing her with the necessary truths to prepare her for black womanhood. Not treating Indigo like a young adult is her mother’s way of protecting her and being a good parent. Unlike her mother, Uncle John does not feel the need to shelter Indigo. Uncle John is characterized as being “off” and does not subscribe to the unwritten rules of keeping children naive, so he sees no fault in educating Indigo on the history of her people.

The presence of white people in this passage, and in this book as a whole, is extremely different from the Shange works that we have read so far. In for colored girls, white people are not present nor seem to be of much importance. Of course, the systems that oppress the black women in the choreopoem are sometimes the result of a white presence, but in her manual for young black women how to deal with a white presence is not the goal. Instead she focuses on the relationships of black women with black men, other black women and self exploration. In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo there is discussion about how black people must live their lives in response to the presence of white people around them. In this passage Uncle John schools Indigo on the mistakes slave masters maid when trying to subdue the spirits and cultures of black slaves. He does not conceal his contempt and disapproval of white people and their actions towards black people, in a way that we have yet not seen Shange of her characters refer to white people.

Questioning Binaries: Latin-Soul Music

by Nicole on November 3, 2015 1 Comment

In Rod Hernandez’s “Latin Soul,” he writes that the recognition of similarities in music between black and latino people has helped bring to light the crossings of their two cultures. The “shared musical sensibilities” of their music was heard most often in neighborhoods where black Americans and latinos shared similar disenfranchised spaces, such as in the South Bronx of New York City (335). Hernandez explains that the “varied musical traditions of the African diaspora were instrumental in bringing about greater awareness of blackness and brownness,” (335). Knowledge of the cross over between black and latino cultures has been suppressed because of color prejudice, but the influence of African culture on all types of music of the diaspora is one place where the similarities in culture are more easily recognized.

This discussion of black and latino cultures and the similarities in their music reminded me of a movie I saw called Chef (2014), about a struggling chef who drives his food truck from Miami all the way back to his home in California. In the soundtrack for the movie latin music style is mixed with jazz and blues and reflects the stops the protagonist makes on his journey back to California. Traveling between these two locations with large latino populations, California and Miami, the protagonist surveys the South and the food and musical traditions which it holds. The movie focuses on the locations of Miami, New Orleans and Austin as the locus of the changes in music. The soundtrack to the movie reflects this fusion of black and latino culture. Some of the songs are originally sung by black artists but have been reworked in the style of salsa. When I saw the movie I thought the soundtrack was the best feature, and I could not think why I had never heard black and latino music combined in this way. In the text, Hernandez says that what “is amazing about well groomed Salsa musicians is their ability to play all styles of music;” this soundtrack is emblematic of this statement (335). When I listened to this soundtrack the same emotions churned in me as when I listen the jazz my grandparents used to play for me as a child.

“so our children will know…& be proud”: Coltrane and black music

by Nicole on October 15, 2015 0 Comments

In Jayne Cortez’s poem, “How Long Has This Trane Been Gone,” she writes about the preservation of black legends and of black history. She says that Blues and Jazz artists have been forgotten; that their work of creating music for and about black people has been overlooked.

“Will you remember their names

or do they have no names

no lives—only products

to be used”

Cortez makes a claim for black music and its ability to allow black people to reclaim their history and a culture of their own. She believes that people have begun to forget the importance of the music of black artists who have died and that black people no longer appreciate the meaning of their artistry. There is an anxiety about forgetting, and therefore losing black culture.

Assignments

by Kim Hall on October 9, 2015 0 Comments

The page numbers on the syllabus for Black Macho translate into: Part 1, chapter 1, Part II, chapters 1 & 3

from SOS Calling All Black People! A Black Arts Movement Reader:

Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement” (essay) 55

Amira Baraka, “Black Art” (essay)

Read one of these three:

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