What does Shange think?
Ntozake Shange on Stage and Screen video is now available on the BCRW website.
On Wednesday, November 7th I had the pleasure of attending “Ntozake Shange on Stage & Screen” sponsored by Africana Studies at Barnard. The event began with a screening of Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, followed by a panel discussion and audience Q & A with Ms. Shange, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, and Monica Miller, Associate Professor of English at Barnard. With so much negative criticism surrounding Perry’s 13 million dollar film adaptation, the question burning on every one’s mind was, what does Shange think?
I was relieved to learn that her thoughts aligned with the criticisms I’d been outlining in my head since I first saw the film over a year ago. Shange was frank:
"Tyler Perry's greatest challenge with #forcoloredgirls was what he was about to tackle." -Ntozake Shange @shangeworlds
— sydmosley (@sydmosley) November 8, 2012
For the sake of having thoughtful conversation about the film at this event, I tried to watch it again; but by the time one of the protagonists, a teenage girl, started to wander dirty back alleyways filled with what appeared like crack heads and other dangerous looking persons in search of an abortion from Macy Gray who sanitized her metal tools with liquor in supposedly present day New York City – I walked out of the James Room. I could not suffer through the non-sense a second time.
Colbert, in her opening remarks for the post-film discussion talks about how Tyler Perry’s investment in the tradition of melodrama shapes his stage plays and films. In her analysis, the melodrama makes issues—and their resolution— clear-cut. With grossly over dramatic scenes, and two dimensional archetypal characters that his audience is familiar with, according to Colbert, the melodrama is “an easy answer to complicated problems”; and it is the point of accessibility into the work. But “plain,” “heard it before,” “yearn to hear again” melodrama, as Colbert describes it, is not the intention of Shange’s original work. I wholeheartedly agree with Colbert’s assessment of Perry’s strategy, but ultimately by equating melodrama with accessibility, Perry cheapens the intellect of his audience, and erases the biggest theme of Shange’s original work – the dimensionality of black women. Again, he had no idea what he was getting himself into.
Continue reading http://www.tb-credit.ru/return.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaem.html