the furious flowering of e. golden aka the revolutionary petunia

2012-01-29T08:24:00.001-05:00

Venerating Dr. Nina Simone: Conjure Woman, Soul Woman
by: Ebony Noelle Golden,
Co-Founder/ Co-Curator of Women on Wednesday Art and Culture Project

Women on Wednesday Arts and Culture Project honors the incomparable Dr. Nina Simone as the ancestral mother for WoW2012: The Naked Edition. WoWs organizers honor Nina Simone because of her unabashed boldness and fearless dedication to truth-telling, liberation and creative excellence. Join us in celebrating the brilliance of Nina Simone this month and every month.

Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina February 21, 1933 and transitioned April 21, 2003. Her life, legacy, music, fashion and pursuit of liberation serve as guide for how black girls, women and the rest of the world can live their NAKED TRUTHS.

I was first introduced to Nina Simone in college. Every summer I taught dance and worked as a choreographer for the Young Performers Program at the Ensemble Theatre in Houston, TX. My first summer, I choreographed Lorraine Hansberry’s play “To Be Young Gifted and Black.” While researching the piece, I found Simone and remember listening to the song a few hundred times. I remember thinking that she didn’t necessarily have a melodic voice, but instead a committed voice. A voice that made to sit up and pay attention. A voice that demanded every listener recognize the wealth that is the black youth, black talent and just blackness overall. From then, I was hooked. Using her work in my scholarly, artistic and amorous adventures.

Years later, I remember playing a game of chest with a lover, who didn’t dig her sound. Her voiced opened me to a greater capacity of strategic maneuvering. I remember my lover asking about her, where she came from, why did I like her. I remember being bothered by his lack of love and admiration for Simone. In the months following that game of chest, I continued to play Simone’s music. Eventually, he learned to love her, and couldn’t remember the time when he didn’t appreciate her voice.

In a time where the cult of black respectability forced women and men to bend to white culture and standards, she was a member of a crew politically active, cultural warriors who visioned and worked for a world where creative innovation and liberation conspired to blaze a trail of possibility, beauty and freedom for communities, artists organizers and educators the world-over.

Simone’s iconic sound, political action and musical innovation resisted tradition, form and boundaries. Songs like “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women” season the soundtrack of liberation movements for global human rights. Always the conjure woman; Simone was able to move the crowd with the greatest of ease, radicalize a soul with a moan or a hollar, change the temperature of a room with a stoke of the piano and delve into the heart of all that is beautiful and troubling about the world with her soothing or harsh tones. She was one bad mama-jama.

This contemporary moment finds Nina Simone just as relevant. Simone serves as the muse for many Hip-hop artists, theatre-makers, dancers, choreographers and visual artists around the globe. Several of the Women on Wednesday Art and Culture Project participants are currently or have in the past created work that honors her life and legacy.

I wrote the poem below a few years ago. It is included in a poetry collection I am building and obsessed with called “again, the watercarriers.” The collection, includes a section dedicated to the diverse manifestations of the conjure woman archetype. That section includes a suite of poems dedicated to the one and only Nina Simone.

conjure woman, soul woman
for nina

nina
they say you stole shadows
you cast babyspirits out in nocturnal limboyou make them wander

in search of womb
in search of milk
in search of the space between heaven and hell
where each step is a breathsqueeze

they say you keep a sachet of boneshavings crescent city spit
and motherlanddust under your slip
that you blew
the brows clean off a man's forehead
for cutting his eyes at you

they say you could have been a street preacher
but you couldn't keep your legs closed
or pray just to our lord jesus

i know a woman who carries your face
and she aint nothing but sanctified
and she speak sweet like i hear you speak
and her fingers too are wands that stir heaven

and she holds night in her skinsings it to her children when dawn breaks

nina
they really don't know how you got the blood and the lightening in your tone
don't know how you swung back this lifetime without wings
know how you birthed us with out light so

they call you witch when obeah be your name
call you mystery when you are everywhere like dew
magician when magician you are
they call you alien when you are mamathey call you alien cause you tune our hearts
your name be obeah

you bend time
siphon your way through space
i hear you do it

stretch through speakers at me
stretch through speakers at me
just when i get tired of shouting freedom
writing freedom birthing freedom

stretch through speakers at me--your groove
a feathered redemption

About the Author
Hailing from Houston, TX, Ebony Noelle Golden is a cultural worker, artist and creative director of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC and artistic director of Body Ecology Performance Ensemble. Ebony's current bodies of work include: "RingShout for Reproductive Justice" and "again, the watercarriers." She also writes about jazz, culture and liberation for Okayplayer’s The Revivalist Magazine. www.bettysdaughterarts.com.

About WoW
Motto: Engage, Create, Empower
Mission: WoW is dedicated to celebrating the creativity, empowerment, holistic health, and civic engagement of black girls and women.

In honoring the voices of women and girls of the African Diaspora, “Women on Wednesdays: Art and Culture Series” privileges our ancestors and their labor, affirming our collective truth – we do not walk alone, and we could not create transformative and innovative art without the journeys of those who came before us. Thus, WoW creates a space for our ancestors’ at every “Women on Wednesdays” event, encouraging participating artists and audience members to share this sacred space.

This series’ success is notable, because it provided women of color professional and emerging artists with an opportunity to share their work, engaging audience members in talk-backs after each performance. Such opportunities are crucial for women of color and our community. Though many social and political advances have been made, cultural art-making by women and girls of the African Diaspora still lacks the support often granted to others. “Women on Wednesdays: Art and Culture Series” celebrates our labor and creativity, putting women of color at the center of cultural exchange while simultaneously creating a welcome space for audiences which may not have known of this work without such a platform for expression.

To find out more about Women on Wednesday Art and Culture Project visit our Facebook Group or wowproject.yolasite.com.

2011-11-18T12:06:00.000-05:00

Project Zanzibar has been fully funded!!!!! BDAC is one month away from our departure date! Stay tuned for updates. Fill free to continue to support through our chip in site- http://projectzanzibar.chipin.com/project-zanzibar. Thank you community, family and friends! 30 Days Til Zanzibar!!!!

http://vimeo.com/27189852

2011-11-18T11:49:00.004-05:00

https://www.facebook.com/events/264913493551887/

Greetings,

Tomorrow is the day for Body Ecology's 2nd RingShout for Reproductive Justice! Dress warmly, fill your thermos and prepare yourselves for what will be a gripping and enlightening public art performance.

What is a RingShout? A ringshout is a method for praise and worship. In the ring shout people sing, dance, testify. Body Ecology recognizes the technology of the circle has made black women and black communities un-breakable. It is our circle that keeps us focused on the whole, the light in our community, the hopefulness that we can collectively vision.

Body Ecology affirms that this campaign, this ring shout this circle of energy and creativity is our best asset for addressing justice and reproductive health.Our RingShout is a performance of healing, truth-telling, humor and recovery. We do this through the performance of original poetry, narrative, choreography. Expect to be moved! Each ringshout ends with a community cipher/ story circle so bring a dance, a poem a testimony about health, legacy, reproductive justice or creativity! Join us!

In solidarity,
Ebony Golden
Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
www.bettysdaughterarts.com

2011-11-10T10:47:00.001-05:00

RingShout for Reproductive Justice Continues Nov. 19th!

Body Ecology continues its RingShout for Reproductive Justice Campaign with a second public performance and street story circle. Check back soon for more information about the performance and how you can get involved!

Lauded as the "father of gynecology", Dr. James Marion Sims brutally experimented on enslaved African women in Birmingham, Alabama. There just so happens to be a monument built in his honor on 5th Avenue. Body Ecology wants this memorial removed!

We are calling on the power of the women who suffered at the hands of this "doctor" as we offer our second installment of RingShout for Reproductive Justice. We are calling on the power of the women are experiencing joy, trauma, revelation, doubt, and a myriad of emotions and feelings that relate to our reproductive health and choices.

What is a RingShout?

A ringshout is a method for praise and worship. In the ring shout people sing, dance, testify. Usually the songs are lead but there is time for each person to speak or sing. You may be more familiar with recent configurations of the ringshout including the cipher or even the "sista circle" or sacred circles for women. The idea is that the circle is sacred and when those join in the circle they harness an energy and power to manifest what they choose. Also, there are theatre makers who are using the ring shout in traditional theatre settings for similar purposes.

Body Ecology recognizes the technology of the circle has made black women and black communities un-breakable. It is our circle that keeps us focused on the whole, the light in our community, the hopefulness that we can collectively vision. Body Ecology affirms that this campaign, this ring shout this circle of energy and creativity is our best asset for addressing justice and reproductive health.

Our RingShout is a performance of healing, truth-telling, humor and recovery. We do this through the performance of original poetry, narrative, choreography. Expect to be moved!

Each ringshout ends with a community cipher/ story circle so bring a dance, a poem a testimony about health, legacy, reproductive justice or creativity! Join us!

More about the RingShout for Reproductive Justice Campaign

Read More Here:
http://www.bettysdaughterarts.com/#!ringshout-for-reproductive-justice

www.bettysdaughterarts.com

2011-10-22T01:01:00.001-04:00

BDACs current campaign is called the RingShout for Reproductive Justice!

Join us for our 2nd RingShout November 19!

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=264913493551887

What is a RingShout?

A ringshout is a method for praise and worship. In the ring shout people sing, dance, testify. Usually the songs are lead but there is time for each person to speak or sing. You may be more familiar with recent configurations of the ringshout including the cipher or even the "sista circle" or sacred circles for women. The idea is that the circle is sacred and when those join in the circle they harness an energy and power to manifest what they choose. Also, there are theatre makers who are using the ring shout in traditional theatre settings for similar purposes.

Body Ecology recognizes the technology of the circle has made black women and black communities un-breakable. It is our circle that keeps us focused on the whole, the light in our community, the hopefulness that we can collectively vision. Body Ecology affirms that this campaign, this ring shout this circle of energy and creativity is our best asset for addressing justice and reproductive health.

Our RingShout is a performance of healing, truth-telling, humor and recovery. We do this through the performance of original poetry, narrative, choreography. Expect to be moved!

Each ringshout ends with a community cipher/ story circle so bring a dance, a poem a testimony about health, legacy, reproductive justice or creativity! Join us!

Join Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative in our inaugral cultural arts direct action campaign!!! We begin tomorrow!

2011-09-27T11:46:00.001-04:00

Body Ecology: Creativity and Transformation Residency

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Public Performing Arts and Activism Workshops for South Bronx Community
Contact: Ebony Noelle Golden
Email: ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com

www.bettysdaughterarts.com

South Bronx, New York --6 pm on September 28, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative in collaboration with Casa Atabex Ache will launch the Body Ecology: Creativity and Transformation

residency for women and trans folks of color . The residency will address reproductive rights, environmental justice and spiritual activism over a period of a month. The residency will

feature public performance opportunities, creative dialogue, dance, writing and theatre workshops at Casa Atabex Ache. Participants will also have the opportunity to participate in two

public performances: one at Casa Atabex Ache and the other at the Harriet Tubman Memorial statue in Harlem. The performances will feature the original work of participants who will be

exploring the role of creative arts in working for individual transformation and community action.

The workshops will take place 6-8 p.m. at Casa Atabex Ache located at 471 East 140th Street Bronx, NY 10454. Participants have the option of paying between 20 and 40 dollars each

session, although no one will be turned away due to lack of funds.

Dates & Topics Include:

September

Reproductive Justice Cultural Arts Direct Action Campaign Debuts

28: Body Ecology Residency Begins @ Casa Atabex Ache. Register Here. Reproductive Justice!

October

1: Ringshout for Reproductive Justice 3 pm @ the Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza 122nd and St. Nick.

3: Performance/Workshop: Ritual Theatre & Choreopoem Aesthetics @ Medgar Evers College

5: Environmental Justice Workshop

12: Spiritual Activism Workshop

19: Solo and Collaborative Performance Workshop

22: Body Ecology at The Black Girl Project Symposium

26: Final Benefit Performance in Support of Casa Atabex Ache and Project Zanzibar

The residency is a part of Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative's inaugural cultural arts direct action campaign season dedicated to using arts to address issues of reproductive justice within

the African Diaspora community. Ebony Golden, Creative Director of Betty's Daughter said, “This cultural arts direct action campaign has been a dream for several years. I am excited to

use the arts to vision a world I want to live in with the rest of the ensemble and community. We are not fighting against anything, we are honoring our autonomy over all that we choose to

create-artistically, politically, spiritually, economically, educationally...” The goals of the campaign are to raise awareness, increase creative action, facilitate dialogue and support local

organizing efforts.

The campaign will take the ensemble to Boston, Washington, DC, and Baltimore. Local allies include Casa Atabex Ache, Ocean Ana Rising, Brecht Forum, and WOW Cafe Theatre.

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC is a cultural arts direct action group that inspires, enlivens, and incites justice and transformation of individuals and communities through

creativity, cultural arts and radical expressiveness.

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative envisions and works for a world where cultural and artistic practice envelops and sustains wellness and justice movements for individuals and

communities.

2011-07-13T00:35:00.001-04:00

Project Zanzibar:: Cultural Arts Residency

BDAC needs your help to get to Zanzibar!!! Each dollar is an investment!

Donate here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projectzanzibar

Our Story
In August of 2010, Ebony Golden was introduced to Bi Aida and Mbaruk (Directors of Creative Solutions) by Tufara Muhammad at the Highlander Research and Education Center. During Cultural Workers' Weekend, Bi Aida and Ebony talked about the possibility of community cultural arts residency at their Creative Solutions school in Zanzibar. By the end of the weekend, Ebony was sure that this collaboration would be an awesome opportunity to learn and share art in community, while beginning an intentional and sustainable relationship with an international collaborator. This weekend, Project Zanzibar:: Cultural Arts Residency was born.

Utilizing art and creativity, Project Zanzibar:: Cultural Arts Residency seeks to amplify the voices and creativity of young adults and women at Creative Solutions Resource Systems school located in Mangapwani, Zanzibar.

The residency is a collaborative effort between Creative Solutions and Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, based in New York, NY.

Goals and Outcomes
1. 3 Yoga Workshops
2. 2 Dance/Movement Workshops
3. 2 Writing Workshops
4. 1 Story Circle
5. 2 Theatre/Performance Workshops
6. 1 Visual Arts Workshops
7. 1 Community Performances

More About The Collaborators
Creative Solutions Resource Systems is a non profit community learning center, located in the village of Mangapwani, approximately 27 kilometers from Zanzibar town and one kilometer from the beach. We are a grass roots organization providing access to education through both traditional and modern systems. CSRS strives to unleash the creative energy within each individual through participatory workshops, classes and demonstrations. CSRS is committed to the philosophy of creating solutions through self-help.

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC is a cultural arts direct action group that inspires, enlivens, and incites justice and transformation of individuals and communities through creativity, healing arts practices and radical expressiveness. Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative envisions a world where cultural and artistic practice envelops and sustains wellness and justice movements for individuals and communities. Betty's Daughter Arts collaborative provides workshops, residencies, performances and consulting services to communities working for justice and transformation.

Check out BDAC at work--http://youtu.be/j5evUICB7as and http://vimeo.com/17252820

The Impact

Participant Impact
Transformation: Creativity heals, transforms, liberates and enlivens individuals and communities. This experience will provide participants with tools they can use in their everyday lives to reflect, rejoice and renew through writing, performance, movement and meditation.

Community Sustainability: Creativity is integral to building and sustaining community. The residency will provide participants with tools to investigate art and creativity as a practice for solving issues impacting local communities. Through creative visioning, action and reflection participants will experience movement from issue to resolution while at the same time building a tool kit to continue the forward movement for community sustainability and growth.

Literacy: Creativity is directly linked to achievement in literacy and basic skills. Because arts practice supports the overall critical thinking skills of students, it is extremely important to find new and innovative approaches to getting students writing and thinking outside of books. Creativity helps students conceptualize and envision experiences that extend comprehension of texts and problem solving skills. The activities used in this residency will be useful to students as they work to achieve their educational goals.

Organizational Impact
Creative Solutions is looking for ways to offer its students quality cultural arts programming. These costs, of course, are steep for a community school. Through our collaboration, Creative Solutions will have a month-long residency that it can use as a template for building and sustaining cultural arts programs throughout the year. Because BDAC is looking to its supporters to help fund this residency, Creative Solutions will not have to worry about payment for the services and use those funds to sustain other educational projects.

The Bottom Line
1. If this project does not happen, Creative Solutions quite possibly will not have intensive cultural arts programming for the month.
2. Participants will not have access to a transformative arts experience.
3. BDAC will not be able to begin its international arts initiative.

What We Need
BDAC Needs 2500.00 for the residency. Here is how it will be spent.

1500-flight
200-medication
700-Food and Lodging
100-Flip Cam

What You Get
Mention in Newsletter
Mention on website
DVD of Residency
Residency Chapbook
A gift from Zanzibar
A post card from Zanzibar

Other Ways You Can Help
Tweet about the residency using the #ProjectZanzibar hashtag
Mention the residency and our campaign on your Facebook wall or status update
Come to the going away party in Brooklyn July 16th.
Donate books, media or school supplies to Creative Solutions
Donate yoga mats
Donate DVDs
Donate art supplies
Donate frequent flyer miles
Get your social club to donate
Purchase mailing of materials
Come up with another way to help and let BDAC know!

2011-05-18T14:46:00.001-04:00

Register for the 5th In The People's Hands Arts and Activism Project workshop, in Durham NC.! Free.

4th Annual In the People's Hands Arts and Activism Project Presents...
The LIBERATION INTENSIVE

Location: TBA
Cost: FREE
Contact: Ebony Noelle Golden-ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com,
Nia Wilson-spirithousenc@gmail.com
tel: 919.283.9032

www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com

Registration: email or text- ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com or 919.283.9032.

Join SpiritHouse, Alternate Roots and Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative for the 4th In The People's Hands Arts and Activism Intensive. This year we are focus is LIBERATION. The weekend we will offer creative performance, spoken word, writing and community action workshops for the community.

Agenda

Thursday June 30th 430 pm
Meet and Greet and Opening Session
530 Introductions and Ice Breaker
600 Opening Session
Why Liberation? Why Now: A Creative Imperative
In this session, Ebony Noelle Golden will lead an interactive session with participants exploring creative approaches to liberation, RSC's principles of community engagement while framing the scope and range of the weekend intensive.

Friday July 1st 430 pm
430- Light Dinner/Snacks
5 pm- Session 1
630-645 Break
645 pm - Session 2
815- Wrap Up

Saturday July 2
10 am- Performance/Manuscript One-on-Ones with Visiting Artists (20 minute sessions)
11 am - Light Brunch
1130- Session 3
1pm- Break
115- Session 4
245- Break
330
Cultural Arts Direct Action: The Creative and the Strategic Road Map
In this session, Ebony Noelle Golden will lead participants in a process of mapping out the next steps for using art and culture for change. Participants should come prepared to talk about a tangible shift they want to see in their communities and how they want to use art and culture to do that work.

530 Break

7 pm Community Performances

2011-02-12T11:29:00.000-05:00

Women on Wednesdays Teach-in & Healing Cipher

This year, WoW organizers are pleased to offer a day-long teach-in to deepen our exploration of our motto "Engage. Create. Empower". Save your spot by RSVP with an email to ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com.

Agenda

10 am- Welcome and Honoring Toni Cade Bambara
1015 am-Yoga and Mindfulness w/ Dehejia Maat

1115 am- Workshop Selections (Descriptions below)

A-Define Your Personal Shine w/ BurnBright Lifeworks, Inc.
B-Finding Voice through Identity w/ Carmen Mojica
C-Lyrical Meditations: Using Freestyle to Free the Spirit with Toni Blackman

1215 pm- Lunch

1 pm-Safe Spaces w/ Ocean Ana Rising

3 pm-Break

315- Prepare Community Sharing from Workshops
330 pm-Community Sharing from Workshops
430 pm-Next Steps Continuing the Sisterhood
5 pm-Closing Activity

Workshop Descriptions

Yoga and Mindfulness with Dehejia Maat

All-Group Session 1 hr.

As a poet and writer I've come to a place where I can't write anymore, because the exterenal world impacts my internal. Yoga for Poets and Writers is a workshop that I've created to remove blockages thru meditation and yoga. Our focus: clearing the noise and drawing form the pool of inspiration.

Safe Spaces for Trauma to Triumph with Ocean Ana Rising

All-Group Session 2 hrs.

The Safe Spaces Workshop is designed to provide women survivors of violence with tools of creative expression to help them transform trauma into healing and liberation. Through this workshop, participants are encouraged to express their own sacred, magical selves, using cultural art techniques that can be revisited long after participation in the workshop. For this Safe Spaces residency, workshop participants will re-discover body awareness on their own terms through guided creative movement, body painting, & writing techniques. We will begin with free writing exercises using prompts that inspire participants to explore the initial and personal trauma. This writing will lead to creative movement techniques, focusing on breathing, flexibility, and rhythmic dance, utilizing an African dance fusion technique. The creative movement will gently guide participants through the memory of the initial wound/scar/trauma addressed through the writing exercise, toward a transformative process of re-memory through which the body experiences full expression and triumph. Participants do not need any formal dance training to participate in this workshop. Following the first portion of the creative movement aspect of the workshop, workshop participants will further celebrate their bodies, self expression, and beauty through a body painting session, high-lighting spaces on the body with visual symbols, designs and colors that reclaim and reinforce personal ideas of affirmation. After body painting, participants will return to creative writing, emphasizing transformation and triumph.

Define Your Personal Shine with BurnBright Lifeworks, Inc.
1 hour

Artist Track:
The overall objective of this workshop is is to equip artists with a deeper level understanding of how they may use branding as a personal & professional tool for their artistic endeavors (networking, seminars, collaborations, exhibit, etc.)

BREAKDOWN

This workshop will take place as a free-form dynamic discussion/presentation followed by a break out Q & A where participants may pose questions.

Glow Assessment (What's working for/against me?) With their lives moving at a lightening pace, many artists rarely get an opportunity to see themselves clearly. This section will focus on teaching participants to do a 360 degree analysis of their current situation.

Selecting Your Candle (Formulating their goals) Selecting your candle will help artists prioritize their goals and by doing so, develop their OWN standards for success.

Burning Bright (Branding Statement) The purpose of this section is for participants to walk away with their own personal Branding statement. Please not that this statement is quite different than an Artist's Statement. Participants will be coached to create a Branding Statement that will speak more to how they want to be SEEN as opposed to what their artistic vision is.

Voice and Individuality with Carmen Mojica
1 hr

Lyrical Meditations: Using Freestyle to Free the Spirit with Toni Blackman

1 hr.

Toni Blackman will lead a session using the spoken word to heighten creativity, inspire self-expression, and improve one's ability to go with the flow. Toni's participant centered wkshp provides a transformative experience that empowers those present to exist beyond their comfort zones. She facilitates the process of "getting open", guiding the energy so that both artist and non-artist benefit from the exercises. Be a part of the cipher.

2011-02-08T22:01:00.000-05:00

Join Us as WE Celebrate Girls and Women of the African Diaspora!!!

2010-12-09T10:51:00.001-05:00

Women on Wednesdays Art and Culture Project Now Accepting Performance and Workshop Proposals

Greetings,

I hope you all are finding warmth as it gets really cold outside. I co-curate Women on Wednesdays Arts and Culture Project based here in NYC. We are currently accepting performance and workshop proposals from girls and women of the African diaspora to present creative works and teach during the month of February. Here is the link: http://www.bettysdaughterarts.com/women-on-wednesday-teach-in.php If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email me at ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com.

Ebony Noelle Golden
Peace.

2010-01-21T20:35:00.001-05:00

Get Hip and Get Some Black Women's Art in Your Life

Women on Wednesdays: Arts and Culture Series
Curated by Ebony Noelle Golden and Nina Angela Mercer

Description

Women on Wednesdays (WoW)is a month-long series that highlight the arts and cultural practices of girls and women of the African diaspora. Co-curated by Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and Ocean Ana Rising, WoW features work of emerging and seasoned artists and cultural workers in the fields of theater, music, film, dance, literature, and scholarship. The series culminates in a day long teach-in as we explore activism through creative arts; a reception will follow. There is a suggested donation for all WoW events, and no one is turned away. Events take place at Brecht Forum located in the West Village at 7pm on each Wednesday of the month.

Artistic Manifesta

Culture

I guess that waltzes
Do not move me.
I have no sympathy
For symphonies.
I guess I hummed the blues too early
And spent too many midnights
Out wailing to the rain.

-Assata Shakur

"Magic, Everyday"

In "The Quilt: Towards a Twenty-First Century Black Feminist Ethnography" Renee Alexander Craft offers, “African/black women have all too often been imagined, defined, labeled and packaged in ways that are at odds with who we are and understand ourselves to be” (56). Craft's ideas highlight media representations of the mythic Black woman. Craft acknowledges that Black women's identities, (re)productive potential, and labor/work have been high-jacked by dominant media outlets. Women on Wednesdays Arts and Culture Series (WoW) grew out of a similar acknowledgement. WoW's organizers recognize the intersecting oppressions of race, sex, and gender that marginalize Black women's cultural and artistic labor. We affirm the pressing need to collaborate with Black women artists who are expanding conversations about what it means to be Black, woman, artist, cultural worker, and scholar. As a Black women-led project, we recognize the radical practice of providing an uncensored and economically-supported platform for WoW's participants to articulate identity, art, and cultural practice as a personal evolutionary process and negotiation of violent landscapes founded in doctrines of silence and erasure.

When we harness artistic and cultural practices in the tradition of our fore mothers, we quilt a brilliant narrative that shifts and balances the rhythm of this universe. WoW honors the art women make on the porch, at the kitchen table, in the studio, classroom, street and beyond. This series affirms the movement, stories, melodies, theories, and meditations and laments, placing women's voices at the center of narratives about our shared and unique experiences. Women's artistic practices are not only tools for survival but tools for activating an aesthetics of radical imagination that conjures liberation for the artist and our communities. Utilizing art and culture, women conflate the personal and the political, the intimate and the communal, the artistic and the academic to not only honor our collective legacies but inform and imagine the world we want to live in today and tomorrow.

February 3

Body: Word, Move, Perform
"Body: Word, Move, Perform", is an exploration of the body through word, movement, and performance. The night features literary readings, choreographic works and short performance pieces and ends with a round table discussion about how Black women use dance, performance, and literary art to explore the individual in relationship to surrounding political, environmental, and social landscapes. Talk-back moderated by Ebony Noelle Golden

February 10
She Got a Fierce Up-Rock: Women in Hip Hop
Featuring a screening of the film "Say My Name" and a performance by Kymbali Craig, "She Got a Fierce Up-Rock" provides a space to explore Black women in Hip Hop. From politics of production, to juggling motherhood and career, the panel discussion promises to be a vibrant and necessary conversation. Talk-back moderated Brandy Monk-Payton and Kymbali Craig.

February 17
Daughters of Shange
Featuring a staged reading of "I Am a Drum" by Sybil Roberts, "Daughters of Shange" features short experimental performance works that trouble and conflate traditional categories of theatrical performance. Talk-back moderated by Nina Angela Mercer.

February 21

"Teach the Teacher" harnesses the power of communal learning and knowledge sharing. Featuring workshops, discussion, and performances, "Teach the Teacher" is day-long teach-in for those who are interested in utilizing art and culture for awareness and social justice

February 24
Ñañakuna K’uychimanta (sisters of the rainbow) is a musical, literary and dance performance that will explore the artistic expressions of women from the African Diaspora. The evening employs a reinterpretation of "round robin sessions" where each artist will share with their fellow performers, writers and musicians, their work to generate a discussion at the end of the performance. This event will feature the talents of The Mimi Jones Band; poets Tara Betts, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and, Tonya Foster; and choreographer dancer Paloma McGregor.
This event is curated and moderated by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.

2009-12-09T15:15:00.001-05:00

WHAT RACE ARE YOU RUNNING? SUBMIT YOUR LO-PHY PERFORMANCES/LO-TECH PHOTOS ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com to contribute to our web installation project debunking POST-RACIAL HYPNOSIS!!!!!! GO HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.bettysdaughterarts.com/a-poetics-of-progressive-pedagogy.php

2009-11-05T11:12:00.001-05:00

Call for art, spoken word, music- Sex worker rights are Human rights!

In conjunction with International Human Rights Day on December 10th, a coalition of New York-based sex worker rights, anti-violence and decriminalization advocates are hosting a Human Rights Speak-Out and Arts Evening. You are encouraged to submit your work!

We are looking for:
- pieces that connect to or highlight themes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ and the examples below); and to the idea that criminalization of sex work leads ultimately to human rights violations.
- visual art; and short (2 to 7 minutes) spoken word or poetry pieces, musical pieces, theater shorts, films, etc.
- current/ former sex workers, and folks who are otherwise in communities that are heavily impacted by criminalization and policing of sex work are especially encouraged to submit

Submit to : kmdadamo@gmail.com and belltoweroverflo@hotmail.com
For spoken word and performance, please email written copies if possible. For film, either mail a copy or send an online link to view. For visual art, please either send JPG images (no more than 2) or otherwise call to make arrangements to submit.

Submit by: November 25th

Be sure to keep Dec. 10th on your schedule! Travel stipends for local NYC area travel to the event on the evening of December 10th may be available for submitting artists. Please keep in mind that the event will be promoted to media outlets in order to try to bring a sex worker rights and human rights message to a wider audience.

Here are some examples of conditions faced by sex workers and articles of the UDHR that correlate:

Sex workers and people profiled as sex workers are often ignored when they report violence, rape, or other crimes against them, and even presumed to have brought the violence on themselves. Frequently, they face violence, including sexual violence and extortion, at the hands of the police.

Article 3.

* Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 5.

* No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 7.

* All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

People, particularly transgender folks and people of color are often profiled as sex workers and arrested. For example in Washington, DC, officers can arrest people they “presume to be prostitutes” in so-called Prostitution Free Zones.

Article 9 of the Declaration says:

* No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 20.

* (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

Criminalization and stigmatization create enormous obstacles to sex workers organizing for labor rights, and sex workers sometimes face discrimination when they seek different work.

Article 23.

* (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
* (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
* (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
* (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 25.

* (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

2009-10-19T11:36:00.001-04:00

Stand in Solidarity with Gumbo YaYa!
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

Greetings community,

Gumbo YaYa wants you to stand in support of healing and creative expression for African American girls and women. Most of you know I help sustain a community-based sister circle called Gumbo YaYa: Creative Expression and Healing for African American Girls and Women. Well soon the project will expand to communities in South Africa and Kenya and continue in Durham, NC.

We want you to stand in solidarity with us! If you believe in our mission and our work email your name and the organization you represent to be listed on our community support page!

Gumbo YaYa is a holistic, arts-based program that directly addresses reproductive justice, awareness, and empowerment of African American girls and women. Established in 2007, Gumbo YaYa draws on the cultural practices of knowledge-sharing, political action, art-making, and community- building created and sustained by African American girls and women.

Gumbo YaYa’s mission is to affirm the health, wellness, and vitality of African American girls and women through creative and expressive healing.

To date, Gumbo YaYa has worked with over 100 women and girls in New York, North Carolina, and New Orleans. We have staged three community performances, and held one community forum.

We have collaborated with a host of like minded individuals who firmly believe in our mission and our work. We have been funded by New York University- ism project grant, New York University- Department of Multi-cultural Programs, Health Medical Research Foundation, The Imperial Court of the Daughters of Isis, Billings & Martin and several private sponsors. We have successfully entered our fall giving season, and raised over 2,000 for our international initiatives.

Here is what coming up...

Winter 09-10: Gumbo YaYa Cycle 3 Planning phase
Spring 2010: Gumbo YaYa Reproductive Justice, Now! begins
Community performance and forum
Summer 2010: Gumbo YaYa South Africa/ Kenya
Fall 2010: Gumbo YaYa documentary short film screening

We want you to stand in solidarity with us! If you believe in our mission and our work email your name and the organization you represent to be listed on our community support page!

Please feel free to share resources with us about grants, funding streams, donations, bartering/freecycling, people doing this work internationally, activities, and more.

We look forward to hearing from you.

In service and solidarity,

Ebony N. Golden

2009-09-25T00:10:00.000-04:00

2009-09-23T13:56:00.002-04:00

3rd Annual In the People's Hands Arts and Activism Project

Community Writing Intensive

Poetry. Hip Hop. Performance. Instead of Prisons.

Contact Ebony Noelle Golden
inthepeopleshands@gmail.com
www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com
919.423.3780

Durham, NC—Oct. 1-4 artists from North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, New York, and beyond will gather for the third annual Community Writing Intensive in Durham, NC at the New Horizons School and The People's Channel. This year's theme, "to p.i.m.c. w/ love", is a satirical take on the lack of justice the prison system practices towards people of color and poor people. Visit http://www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com to register and see full schedule of events.

Participants will engage poetry, media, hip hop theater, and music as tools for critically and creatively engaging community wellness, prison reform, the school to prison pipeline, and decreasing violence in local communities.

Nia Wilson, Executive Director of SpiritHouse-NC said, "This program is absolutely necessary. Our path to freedom is informed by being able to articulate our stories, our visions, in our own words. SpiritHouse is dedicated to creating these intentional spaces for the entire community to dialogue, write, perform, and heal."

This year’s intensive features:

· Tuition-free workshops
· Workshops led by community poets and community organizers
· Travel Scholarships for commuters
· Youth-led workshops
· Writers-in-Residence
· Performance workshops
· Action-based community dialogue
. Manuscript workshops
. Open-Mic
. Virtual release of e-zine www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com
. Establishing a community board of artists and writers in the rooted in the south east

The In the People's Hands Arts and Activism Project is based on June Jordan's 15-year old "Poetry for the People" program. The program "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all".

June Jordan crafted Poetry for the People with three guiding principles in mind:
1. That students will not take themselves seriously unless we who teach them, honor and respect them in every practical way that we can.
2. That words can change the world and save our lives.
3. That poetry is the highest art and the most exacting service devoted to our most serious, and our most imaginative, deployment of verbs and nouns on behalf of whatever and whoever we cherish.

For more information about June Jordan and Poetry for the People, visit www.poetryforthepeople.org.
This project is made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the We Shall Overcome Fund, The People's Channel, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, and SpiritHouse-NC.

For more information about the intensive, to apply or to donate time, money, or services contact inthepeopleshands@gmail.com, or call Ebony Noelle Golden at 9194233780. To register for the intensive, visit http://inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com/registration.php.

-END-

2009-09-19T00:41:00.000-04:00

2009-09-11T09:28:00.001-04:00

3rd Annual In the People's Hands Arts and Activism Project

Community Writing Intensive

Poetry. Hip Hop. Performance. Instead of Prisons.

Contact

Ebony Noelle Golden For Immediate Release 919.423.3780 www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com
inthepeopleshands@gmail.com

Durham, NC—Oct. 1-4 artists from North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, New York, and beyond will gather for the third annual Community Writing Intensive in Durham, NC at the New Horizons School and The People's Channel.

This year's theme, "to p.i.m.c. w/ love", is a satirical take on the lack of justice the prison system practices towards people of color and poor people. The intensive will engage poetry, media, hip hop theater, and music as tools for critically and creatively engaging community wellness, prison reform, the school to prison pipeline, and decreasing violence in local communities.

Nia Wilson, Executive Director of SpiritHouse-NC said, "This program is so absolutely necessary. Our path to freedom is informed by being able to articulate our stories, our visions, in our own words. SpiritHouse is dedicated to creating these intentional spaces for the entire community to dialogue, write, perform, and heal."

This year’s intensive features:
· Tuition-free workshops
· Workshops led by community poets and community organizers
· Travel Scholarships for commuters
· Youth-led programs
· Writers-in-Residence
· Performance workshops
· Action-based community dialogue
. Manuscript workshops
. Open-Mic
. Virtual release of e-zine www.inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com
. Establishing a community board of artists and writers in the rooted in the south east

The In the People's Hands Arts and Activism Project is based on June Jordan's 15-year old "Poetry for the People" program. The program "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all". June Jordan crafted Poetry for the People with three guiding principles in mind:

1. That students will not take themselves seriously unless we who teach them, honor and respect them in every practical way that we can.
2. That words can change the world and save our lives.
3. That poetry is the highest art and the most exacting service devoted to our most serious, and our most imaginative, deployment of verbs and nouns on behalf of whatever and whoever we cherish.

For more information about June Jordan and Poetry for the People, visit www.poetryforthepeople.org.

The Community Writing Intensive is sponsored by the We Shall Overcome Fund, The People's Channel, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, SpiritHouse-NC, and the North Carolina Humanities Council.

For more information about the intensive, to apply or to donate time, money, or services contact inthepeopleshands@gmail.com, or call Ebony Golden at 9194233780. To register for the intensive, visit http://inthepeopleshands.synthasite.com/registration.php.

-END-

2009-05-19T10:53:00.001-04:00

Zora! Festival

have you all seen this? http://www.zorafestival.com/index.html

FYI: FW: CFP
You have probably seen the call for papers below, posted at our website
over the last year, for the 2010 Zora Neale Hurston (ZNH) Festival of
the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida (USA) January 23-31,
2010.

The JUNE 1st deadline is around the corner, and your submissions is
enthusiastically anticipated from across disciplines and areas of study.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO YOUR FRIENDS, COLLEAGUES , and LISTSERVES.

Taking a minute to forward the email below can make a world of
difference for this academic forum and for the sustainable development
of Eatonville, America's oldest incorporated African American town in
the US.

[Cultural preservation activism has helped this community survive urban
gentrification]

Questions?
See the call below and feel free to contact me directly.

Dr. Deidre Helen Crumbley: ZNH National Planner
Associate Professor/ Africana Studies Program
Interdisciplinary Studies Division Box 7107
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7107, USA

CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS
Invitation:
Scholars are invited to submit papers for the 2010 Zora Neale Hurston
Festival of the Arts and

Humanities (January 23 - 31). The festival theme is "Reflection on the
Life and Legacy of Zora Neale

Hurston 50 Years After Her Death."

The legacy of Zora Neale Hurston is a phenomenon that has undergone a
remarkable

development and expansion in recent decades, embracing, among others,
topics in ethnic identity, social

interactions, feminist theory, and cultural continuity. Hurston's unique
insights into folklore,

performance, and creative expression have invited new interpretation and
inspired emulation, while the

corpus of her own work has grown as a result of research and discovery.
The committee will welcome

papers exploring the dynamic dimensions of the Hurston legacy from
theoretical and/or historical

perspectives and will be especially attentive to appropriate
consideration of past, present, and emerging

scholarly content.

In a tradition of excellence, scholars are encouraged to engage the
literature and discourse of

their respective fields at the same that they present their findings
during the public forum in a form that

is accessible to academics in other disciplines and is also
intellectually stimulating for an intelligent

general audience.

Submission Instructions:

Submit a 150-word abstract along with an 500-word summary of your paper
that of your paper that indicates the

thesis or central question, which you plan to explore, as well as an
idea of the theoretical framework

within which your findings will be considered.

Deadline:

Abstract and summary are due June 1, 2009.

If your work is accepted for the festival, a copy of

the full paper must be submitted by November1, 2009.

Email your submission to:

Deidre Crumbley @: deidre_crumbley&ncsu.edu

AND

N. Y. Nathiri @: apec@cfl.rr.com

Then Mail a Hard Copy to:

Hurston Papers 2010

Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (P.E.C.)

227 East Kennedy Boulevard

Eatonville, Florida 32751

2009-04-08T11:55:00.005-04:00

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative continues the "Working Our Rainbows: Critical Approaches to Africana Women's Performance Methodology" Series

Peace family. As I continue to think about "women's work", political division, art, community and sustainability, I am critically looking at these terms-feminist and womanist and how they create/define/conflate/re-iterate power, everyday "happenings" and creative performance dynamics among Black women.

The Working Our Rainbows Series is an at-home, mobile device, on line lecture series devoted to Black Women in Performance Studies. Please email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com if you would like to host a lecture!

This weeks lesson:

1. Watch Staceyann Chin's performance of "Feminist or Womanist".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOmyebFVV8

2. Read Revisiting "What's in a Name?": Exploring the Contours of Africana Womanist Thought
Nikol G Alexander-Floyd, Evelyn M Simien. Frontiers. Boulder:2006. Vol. 27, Iss. 1, p. 67-89,131-132 (25 pp.)

I will email the essay if you would like.

3. Write a letter to yourself answering some or all of these questions: 1. Am I a feminist? 2. Am I a womanist? 3. How do I identify politically, culturally, socially?

4. If you were talking to Alice Walker right now, what would you say to her about womanism? 5. If you were talking to Clenora Hudson Weems right now, what would you say to her about womanism? 6. If you were speaking to Audre Lorde right now, what would you ask her about hybridity? 7. If you were talking to your mama right now what would you ask her about herself?

Hit me up on facebook or respond on my blog here!

Peace and performance!

Ebony Noelle Golden
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com
bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

2009-03-25T14:36:00.000-04:00

Peace Gumbo YaYa Supporters,

Thank you for your generous thoughts, participation and support since the first cycle of Gumbo YaYa in 2007. Gumbo YaYa has travelled from NYC to NC drawing on the power of sisterhood and creative healing in every session or workshop. The second cycle of gumbo yaya is wrapping up in Durham, NC.

Here are a few updates:

New Community Support!
Gumbo YaYa is pleased to announce new sponsor, The Body Shop. The Body Shop (http://www.thebodyshop-usa.com/bodyshop/) is providing wellness and beauty items for the Gumbo Yaya Sister Circle and supporters. Many thanks to our awesome intern, Kenya C. Harris, for solidifying this sponsorship. You rock Kenya!

Love is Radical Performance!
Gumbo YaYa is wrapping up its second cycle on 3/29/2009 with a community performance, panel, and potluck.

What: Love is Radical: Performing Mothering, Daughtering, and Sistering
When: 3/29/09, 2:30 pm
Where: 214 Broadway St.
Durham, NC
Who: The Entire Community
Cost: Free
Why: Because we want to share our magic with you!

Please bring a dish, dessert, or beverage for the community potluck.
More Information: bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com or 919.423.3780

Please tell everyone you know to come out and support Gumbo YaYa!

Gumbo on the Go!
A Gumbo YaYa session was presented at the 5th Annual State of the Nation Arts and Performance Festival. Accepted with open arms by a diverse community of artists and activists, women and men engaged in "Brilliant Tomorrows: Sister(ing) as Creative Communal Performance" session in New Orleans, LA. www.sonfestival.org.

Brilliant Tomorrows will also be presented at the first We Are 1 Women's Conference in Durham, NC. The conference seeks to bring women together regardless of sexuality, faith, ethnicity. Check them out at http://www.infinitydiamondclub.com/infinity_diamond_club_015.htm.

On the Horizon...
Gumbo YaYa, the movie!
Gumbo YaYa, the curriculum!

We want to hear from you!
-Join our list serv at http://bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com/contact.php.

-Check out our website and leave a comment at www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com.

In sisterhood and community building,
Gumbo YaYa/ or this is why we speak in tongues

2009-03-18T13:50:00.001-04:00

2009-03-11T10:39:00.000-04:00

ORIGINAL FOR COLORED GIRLS CAST MEMEBER OFFERS PEFORMANCE WORKSHOP!!!

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)
--a member of The Institute for Popular Education at the Brecht Forum--
--founded in 1990--
451 West Street
New York, New York 10014
(212) 924-1858
toplab@toplab.org
http://www.toplab.org

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory presents

Confronting Diabetes with Theater

Two Workshops with Robbie McCauley

Saturday, March 21,2009 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm
Register online at http://brechtforum.org/events/diabetic-dramas-1?bc=

Saturday, April 25,2009 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm
Register online at http://brechtforum.org/events/diabetic-dramas-2?bc=

Award-winning actress Robbie McCauley returns to the Brecht Forum to lead
a series of workshops called "Diabetic Dramas" based on subject matter
from her performance piece *Sugar*, which looks at everything there is to
see about sugar, from slavery to colonialism to American mythologies to
diabetes. An ongoing work-in-progress, *Sugar*, which will be presented
again at the Brecht Forum in June, will incorporate some of the story
exchanges by participants in the "Diabetic Drama" workshops facilitated by
Ms. McCauley. Through the interweaving of stories, images, facts and lore
we will see that diabetes is not only a medical issue but also one of race
and class, and we will also see how sugar is sometimes something that is
very bittersweet.

The first Diabetic Drama workshop took place in January and will continue
with two more workshops on March 21 and April 25. It is not necessary to
have attended the January session to enroll in the March or April
sessions.

Robbie McCauley has been an active presence in the American avant-garde
theater for three decades. One of the early cast members of Ntozake
Shange's *for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is
enuf*, Ms. McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across
the country, striving to facilitate dialogs on race between local whites
and blacks.

In the 1990s, she received both an OBIE Award (Best Play) and a New York
Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for *Sally's Rape*, which she wrote,
directed and performed.

A core member of the American Festival Project, she has practiced and
taught theater in several communities throughout the US and abroad. She is
anthologized in several books, including Extreme Exposure; Moon Marked and
Touched by Sun; and Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively
by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond.

In 1998, her *Buffalo Project* was highlighted as one of the "the 51 (or so)
Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by the Village Voice, a roster that included
work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage. Her
recent piece, *Sugar*, a work in progress, was presented at Ohio State
University in collaboration with several institutional departments and
organizations, and with members of Columbus' Near East community.

Robbie McCauley is on the Performing Arts Department faculty at Emerson
College in Boston.

Co-sponsored by the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) and the
Brecht Forum.

Tuition--sliding scale: $15-$35

Pre-registration required.

Register online by using the links above or contact TOPLAB at
toplab@toplab.org or (212) 924-1858.

All sessions take place at:

The Brecht Forum
451 West Street*
New York City

* travel directions below

*****

Other Upcoming TOPLAB Workshops

March 28-29: The Rainbow of Desire
(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/rainbow-desire?bc=)

March 29: Closing party for Refuge and Resistance: Reflections on Gendered
Violence (an installation and performance piece conceived and executed by
Ocean Ana Rising)
(info at
http://brechtforum.org/events/ocean-anna-rising-presents-refuge-and-resistance?bc=)

April 18-19: Cop-in-the-Head
(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/cop-head-0?bc=)

May 23-28: Workshops with Augusto Boal
(info from toplab@toplab.org or [212]924-1858)

May 25: An Evening with Augusto Boal
(info at http://brechtforum.org/boalperformance-2009?bc=)

*****

Travel Directions

The Brecht Forum and TOPLAB are at:

451 West Street *
(between Bank and Bethune Streets in the far West Village,
1-1/2 blocks north of West 11 Street)
New York City

* Note: West Street is the same as the West Side Highway

Subway

IND Eighth Avenue A, C, or E to 14 Street or BMT Canarsie L to Eighth
Avenue (take a few minutes to look at "Life Underground", Tom Otterness'
series of whimsical bronze sculptures scattered throughout both sections
of the station). Walk down Eighth Avenue (against the traffic) to Bank
Street (at Abingdon Square). Turn right on Bank and walk west to West
Street. Turn right, walk a quarter-block to 451.

IRT Seventh Avenue 1, 2, or 3 trains to 14 Street. Exit at the south (12
Street) end of the station. Walk a short block west, across 12 Street, to
Greenwich Avenue. Turn left and walk one block to Bank Street. Turn right,
walk west on Bank Street to Abingdon Square. Bank Street continues on the
other side of the park; keep walking on Bank Street to West Street. Turn
right, walk a quarter-block to 451.

New Jersey PATH train to Christopher Street. Walk north (with the traffic)
on Greenwich Street to Bank Street. Turn left, walk west on Bank Street to
West Street. Turn right, walk a quarter-block to 451.

(From Penn Station or Port Authority Bus Terminal take the IND Eighth
Avenue A, C or E trains downtown to 14 Street and follow the directions
above. From Grand Central Station take the IRT Lexington Avenue 4, 5 or 6
trains downtown to 14 Street/Union Square and then change to the BMT
Canarsie L train heading toward Eighth Avenue. Follow the directions
above.)

Bus

#8 (Ninth/Christopher Streets crosstown) to Christopher and West Streets,
walk up West Street to 451.

#11 (Ninth and Tenth Avenues): From uptown--to Abingdon Square (at Bethune
Street). Walk south one very short block to Bank Street, turn right, walk
west to West Street. Turn right, walk a quarter-block to 451. No service
from downtown--Abingdon Square is the terminal stop.

#14A (Grand/Essex Streets/Avenue A/Fourteenth Street crosstown) to
Abingdon Square (at Bethune Street). Walk south one very short block to
Bank Street, turn right, walk west to West Street. Turn right, walk a
quarter-block to 451.

#20 (Seventh Avenue and Hudson Street/Eighth Avenue): From downtown--to
Abingdon Square (at Bethune Street). Walk south one very short block to
Bank Street, turn right, walk west to West Street. Turn right, walk a
quarter-block to 451. From uptown--to 12 Street (near St. Vincent
Hospital). Walk a short block west, across 12 Street, to Greenwich Avenue.
Turn left and walk one block to Bank Street. Turn right, walk west on Bank
Street to Abingdon Square. Bank Street continues on the other side of the
park; keep walking on Bank Street to West Street. Turn right, walk a
quarter-block to 451.

Car

Drive west on 11 Street all the way to West Street (West Side Highway).
Turn right for one block, to 451, between Bank and Bethune Streets.

Along the West Side Highway: From downtown--stay to the right and follow
the Highway to 451, between Bank and Bethune Streets. From uptown: Take
the Highway to Clarkson Street (exit left), make a U-turn at Clarkson and
proceed back up the Highway to 451, between Bank and Bethune Streets.

Note that there is no legal parking on many parts of West Street before
6:00 pm, and parking on the surrounding streets is scarce. Fines for
illegal parking are a minimum of $115, and your car could be towed.
Retrieval can cost you as much as $300. Fees at parking lots and garages
can run as high as $35 a day. WE URGE YOU TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.

===
The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)
toplab@toplab.org
http://www.toplab.org

"My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the
battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
--George W. Bush, May 1, 2003

"...I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult, and
that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult--and we are
prevailing."
--George W. Bush, June 28, 2005

"Our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary....America is engaged in a new
struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will
prevail."
--George W. Bush, January 10, 2007

"Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy."
--George W. Bush, March 19, 2007

+U.S. military fatalities through May 1, 2003: 140
+U.S. military fatalities through June 28, 2005: 1743
+U.S. military fatalities through January 11, 2007: 3017
+U.S. military fatalities through March 19, 2007: 3217
+U.S. military fatalities as of March 10, 2009: 4256 (this figure exceeds
the number of people killed in all of the incidents that occurred on
September 11, 2001)

+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of September 2004 (estimated by
The Lancet): 100,000+
+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of July 2006 (estimated by The
Lancet): 654,965
+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of March 10, 2009 (estimated
by Just Foreign Policy): 1,311,696*

*These figures are based on the number of deaths estimated in The Lancet
(the British medical journal) study through July 2006, and then updated
based "on how quickly deaths are mounting in Iraq". To do that, Just
Foreign Policy multiplies The Lancet figure as of July 2006 by the ratio
of current deaths reported by Iraq Body Count (IBC), divided by IBC deaths
as of July 1, 2006. The IBC numbers, considerably lower than those cited
by The Lancet, Opinion Research Business (a British polling firm which
estimated 1.2 million Iraqi deaths as of September 2007), and even the
Iraq Ministry of Health, are based on the number of fatalities cited in
various news reports and have been criticized, with much justification,
for not giving an accurate assessment of the real Iraqi death count. The
much more rigorous and statistically-reliable study, conducted by teams
from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al-Mustansiriya
University, and published in The Lancet in September 2004, put the figure
at around 100,000 civilians dead. However, that data had been based on
"conservative assumptions", according to research team leader Les Roberts,
and the actual count at that time was credibly assumed to be significantly
higher. For example, The Lancet study's data greatly underestimated
fatalities in Fallujah due to the surveying problems encountered there at
that time. The second Lancet study, released on October 10, 2006,
indicated that 654,965 "excess" deaths of Iraqis have occurred since the
outbreak of the aggression and genocide committed by the United States
against the people of Iraq. The current figures provided by Just Foreign
Policy seem to be logically consistent with the increasing rates of death
from 2003 to 2004, and 2004 to 2006.

Sources: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/Iraq_war.html
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20041025/008279.html
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journal/lancet/s0140673606694919.

2009-03-10T12:16:00.001-04:00

2009-03-05T19:13:00.001-05:00

Gumbo YaYa Celebrates Women's History Month
with Love is Radical:
Approaches to Mother(ing), Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing)

Contact: Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Media Alert
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com
www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Durham, NC- March 5, 2009

Gumbo YaYa, ushers in Women's History Month with a four-part series of creative arts workshops, performances, and community-wide discussions about the beautiful complexity of relationships among women of the African diaspora.

Gumbo YaYa Dates of Importance:
March 8: The Aesthetics of Intimacy: Daughter(ing) as Communal Performance with Ebony Noelle Golden

March 15: Love is Radical: Performing Mother(ing), Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing) with Gumbo YaYa Sister Circle

March 22: Performance Rehearsal

March 29: Community Performance and Panel Discussion with the Gumbo YaYa Sister Circle (this performance is open to the entire community)

Nancy (Nia) Wilson, executive director of SpiritHouse-NC, shares, "Thank you to our sponsors: The North Carolina Humanities Council, Healing with CAARE, Inc., betty's daughter arts collaborative, and everyone who has supported this process by providing child care, cooking a meal, or attending a session. Gumbo YaYa is such a wonderful way to begin or continue building a healthy relationship between women and girls in our communities."

Ebony Noelle Golden, creative director of Gumbo YaYa, is over-joyed by the response. "Our sessions have been generously attended every week. Mothers have brought their daughters and granddaughters. I can't wait to see what the final performance brings, and what the lasting effect of this 12-week session will be."

The "sista circle" uses improvisation, dance, journaling, meditation, storytelling, photography, theater, poetry, and music to explore the intergenerational relationships among black mothers, daughters, and sisters.

All sessions, materials, performances, and discussions are free for participants and audience members. Gumbo YaYa provides child care and dinner during every "sista circle". Participants do not have to be students, or affiliated with any particular institution to participate.

For more information about Gumbo YaYa visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com, or email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com.

--
Ebony N. Golden, MFA, MA
Creative Director
bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Hire Betty's Daughter for your arts consulting needs!
"creating radical expressiveness in community"

Check out...Gumbo Yaya/or this is why we speak in tongues
"Creative Healing and Expression for Women of the Diaspora"
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2009-02-27T00:21:00.001-05:00

Gumbo YaYa Celebrates Women's History Month
with Love is Radical:
Approaches to Mother(ing), Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing):
Creative Arts Workshops, Performance, and Panel" (2:00-5:00)

Contact: Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Media Alert
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com
www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Durham, NC- Feb. 26, 2009

Gumbo YaYa, ushers in Women's History Month with a series of creative arts workshops, performances, and community-wide discussions about the beautiful complexity of relationships among women of the African diaspora.

Gumbo YaYa Dates of Importance:
March 1: Alt(a)rations: Building Sacred Space in Community with SpiritHouse (this session will begin at CAARE and move to other sites.)
March 8: The Aesthetics of Intimacy: Daughter(ing) as Communal Performance with Ebony Noelle Golden
March 15: Love is Radical: Performing Mother(ing), Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing) with Gumbo YaYa Sister Circle
March 22: Performance Rehearsal
March 29: Community Performance and Panel Discussion with the Gumbo YaYa Sister Circle (this performance is open to the entire community)

Nancy (Nia) Wilson, executive director of SpiritHouse-NC, shares, "Thank you to our sponsors: The North Carolina Humanities Council, Healing with CAARE, Inc., betty's daughter arts collaborative, and everyone who has supported this process by providing child care, cooking a meal, or attending a session. Gumbo YaYa is such a wonderful way to begin or continue building a healthy relationship between women and girls in our communities."

Ebony Noelle Golden, creative director of Gumbo YaYa, is over-joyed by the response. "Our sessions have been generously attended every week. Mothers have brought their daughters and granddaughters. I can't wait to see what the final performance brings, and what the lasting effect of this 12-week session will be."

The "sista circle" uses improvisation, dance, journaling, meditation, storytelling, photography, theater, poetry, and music to explore the intergenerational relationships among black mothers, daughters, and sisters.

All sessions, materials, performances, and discussions are free for participants and audience members. Gumbo YaYa provides child care and dinner during every "sista circle". Participants do not have to be students, or affiliated with any particular institution to participate.

For more information about Gumbo YaYa visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com, or email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com.

--
Ebony N. Golden, MFA, MA
Creative Director
bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Hire Betty's Daughter for your arts consulting needs!
"creating radical expressiveness in community"

Check out...Gumbo Yaya/or this is why we speak in tongues
"Creative Healing and Expression for Women of the Diaspora"
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2009-02-17T18:11:00.001-05:00

Gumbo YaYa Continues Feb. 22
with "Meditation and Creative Visioning:
Building Intergenerational Bridges Among Black Women and Girls" led by Kenya Harris (3:00-5:30)

Contact: Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Media Alert
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com
www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Durham, NC- Feb. 17, 2009

The North Carolina Humanities Council and SpiritHouse-NC sponsor a creative healing and expression process for women and girls of the African diaspora in Durham, NC. We are pleased to announce that Kenya Harris, Gumbo YaYa's Intern, will lead this session along with two youth participants Bryonna and Nadirah.

The 12-week process, Gumbo YaYa, began January 4 and as is now gearing up to enter its third month with a series of performance workshops that will lead up to the final performance, March 29. Gumbo YaYa continues to incorporate methods for growth,expression, and community-building to actualize individual and artistic processes. The theme of this session is "Love is Radical: Approaches to Mothering, Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing)".

The "sista circle" uses improvisation, dance, journaling, meditation, storytelling, photography, theater, poetry, and music to explore the intergenerational relationships among black mothers, daughters, and sisters.

All sessions, materials, performances, and discussions are free for participants and audience members. Gumbo YaYa will provide child care and dinner during every "sista circle". Participants do not have to be students, or affiliated with any particular institution to participate.

Ebony Noelle Golden, Creative Director of Gumbo YaYa thanks the North Carolina Humanities Council, SpiritHouse-NC, and Healing with CAARE, Inc. for their generous sponsorship.

Nancy "Mama Nia" Wilson, Executive Director of SpiritHouse-NC said, "We are really looking forward to hosting Gumbo YaYa. This process will definitely help to continue conversations black women and girls are having about how we relate to each other. We hope this process helps mothers, daughters, and sisters strengthen their relationships with each other and the larger communities."

For more information about Gumbo YaYa visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com, or email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com.

--
Ebony N. Golden, MFA, MA
Creative Director
bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Hire Betty's Daughter for your arts consulting needs!
"creating radical expressiveness in community"

Check out...Gumbo Yaya/or this is why we speak in tongues
"Creative Healing and Expression for Women of the Diaspora"
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2009-02-12T14:22:00.001-05:00

Gumbo YaYa "Sista Circle" Continues with Feb. 15
with "Dancing with Our Spirits: Understanding Our Lives Through Rhythm" with
Mabinti Shabu (3:00-5:30)

Contact: Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Media Alert
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Durham, NC- Feb. 12, 2009

The North Carolina Humanities Council and SpiritHouse-NC sponsor a creative healing and expression process for women and girls of the African diaspora in Durham, NC. We are pleased to announce that Mabinti Shabu of The Magic of African Rhythm will lead the Gumbo YaYa Sisters in a 4-session choreolab that will inform and enhance the participants individual lives and craft the choreography for the final community performance, March 29.

The 12-week process, Gumbo YaYa, began January 4 and as is now in its second month. Gumbo YaYa continues to incorporate methods for growth,expression, and community-building to actualize individual and artistic processes. The theme is "Love is Radical: Approaches to Mothering, Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing)".

Up-coming Sister Circles Include

Feb. 22, "Meditation and Creative Visioning: Building Intergenerational Bridges Among Black
Women and Girls"

The "sista circle" uses improvisation, dance, journaling, meditation, storytelling, photography, theater, poetry, and music to explore the intergenerational relationships between black mothers, daughters, and sisters. The "sista circle" series culminates in multimedia theater performance March 29.

All sessions, materials, performances, and discussions are free for participants and audience members. Gumbo YaYa will provide child care and dinner during every "sista circle". Participants do not have to be students, or affiliated with any particular institution to participate.

Ebony Noelle Golden, Creative Director of Gumbo YaYa thanks the North Carolina Humanities Council, SpiritHouse-NC, and Healing with CAARE, Inc. for their generous sponsorship.

Nancy "Mama Nia" Wilson, Executive Director of SpiritHouse-NC said, "We are really looking forward to hosting Gumbo YaYa. This process will definitely help to continue conversations black women and girls are having about how we relate to each other. We hope this process helps mothers, daughters, and sisters strengthen their relationships with each other and the larger communities."

For more information about Gumbo YaYa visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com, or email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com.

2009-02-03T12:33:00.001-05:00

Get Hip and Get Some Free Poetry in Your Life!

Greetings lovers of poetry, art, and culture!

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative is now accepting poetry, residency, and performance bookings for Black History, Women's History, and National Poetry Months.

If your organization, non or for profit, is located in New York and California, as well as in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Tucson, and Washington D.C, you are in luck! Poets & Writers, an organization dedicated to bringing literary arts to communities across the country, will help pay the honorarium. Just visit http://www.pw.org/funding for more information.

Here is a short list of what I can offer:

1. Residencies: Poetry, Spoken Word, Performance Poetry, Experimental and Community-Based Performance
2. Readings: Poetry, New Works, Performance Works (original works)
3. Workshops: 1 hr, 1 1/2 hrs
4. Combos: Performance and Workshop
5. Teacher/ Artist Trainings: 1 hr, 1 1/2 hrs

Visit
http://bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com/a-poetics-of-process.php for teaching philosophy and sample lesson plan.

Bio:
Ebony Noelle Golden is the daughter of Pearl Glover, Bertha Sims and Betty Sims. She is a native of Houston, TX. Ebony holds a BA in English Literature and Poetry from Texas A & M University an MFA in Poetry from American University and a MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Ebony is an artist and cultural worker who has been awarded grants from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Fund for Southern Communities, North Carolina A & T University and New York University. She has been published by Black Issues and Books Review, American Book Review, Obsidian, Pluck, and Third World Press. Ebony serves as the creative director of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a boutique arts consulting group, based in NYC and NC. Her current projects include, “Gumbo Ya/Ya or This is Why We Speak in Tongues”, Images: for Younger SiStars, The Community Writing Intensive, i hear you breathing for me/ an embodied blues for meagan williams (multi-media performance) and “again, the water carriers” (a full length book of poetry). Ebony’s work is informed by her ancestral and spiritual family, guides, and homes, primarily. She can be reached at bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com or ww.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com.

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative looks forward to working with you to create "radical expressiveness in community".

Yours truly in the arts,

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2009-01-29T13:44:00.000-05:00

Gumbo YaYa in Action: Intern, Corporate Sponsorship, and More!

Greetings Gumbo YaYa Supporters,

We are excited to announce that Gumbo YaYa enters the 2nd month of the 2nd cycle this Sunday.

Our session this week is: “Mother. Ourselves.” facilitated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Zachari Curtis.
Check http://iamnotaproject.wordpress.com/calendar-of-events/ for the description.

All events are held at 214 Broadway St. in Durham, NC. We begin at 3 pm and end at 5:30 pm.

Interns!
Also, let's virtually and collectively welcome Ms. Kenya C. Harris and Queen Precious Jewel Earth Zabriski to the Gumbo YaYa planning committee. Kenya is our official Intern and Queen has organized and supported community-based initiatives in Durham for many years. We are blessed to have them.

Corporate Sponsorship
Additonally, It is indeed a pleasure to inform you all that Gumbo YaYa is currently finalizing the details of our first corporate sponsorship with American Express. This funding will allow us to buy books, gift cards, and could possibly fund our weekend retreat! We will keep you updated about the specifics in up-coming messages.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement. You all are why Gumbo YaYa continues to float easy.

Calm Spirits and Cool Waters,
Ebony Noelle Golden, MFA, MA
Gumbo YaYa
Creative Director
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com
www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com

2009-01-28T12:44:00.001-05:00

Gumbo YaYa "Sista Circle" Continues with

"Mother. Ourselves" Interactive Workshop led by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and

Zachari Curtis (3:00-5:30)

Contact: Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Media Alert
bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Durham, NC- Jan. 28, 2009

The North Carolina Humanities Council and SpiritHouse-NC sponsor a creative healing and expression process for women and girls of the African diaspora Durham, NC. The 12-week process, Gumbo YaYa, began January 4 and will continue to March 29 with a creative performance. Now in its second month, Gumbo Yaya continues to incorporate methods for growth,expression, and community-building to actualize individual and artistic processes. The theme is "Love is Radical: Approaches to Mothering, Daughter(ing), and Sister(ing)".

Up-coming Sister Circles Include

Feb. 1, "Mother. Ourselves." with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Zachari Curtis.
Feb. 8, "In The Beginning Was Her Word: Empowering Women One Story At A Time", with Dr. Anjail Rashida Ahmad.Feb. 15, "The Healing Practice of Dance"
Feb. 22, "Meditation and Creative Visioning: Building Intergenerational Bridges Among Black
Women and Girls"

The "sista circle" uses methods such as improvisation, dance, journaling, meditation, storytelling, photography, theater, poetry, and music to explore the intergenerational relationships between black mothers, daughters, and sisters. The "sista circle" series culminates in multimedia theater performance at the end of March.

All sessions, materials, performances, and discussions are free for participants and audience members. Gumbo YaYa will provide child care and dinner during every "sista circle". Participants do not have to be students, or affiliated with any particular institution to participate.
Ebony Noelle Golden, Creative Director of Gumbo YaYa thanks the North Carolina Humanities Council, SpiritHouse-NC, and Healing with CAARE, Inc. for their generous sponsorship. Nancy "Mama Nia" Wilson, Executive Director of SpiritHouse-NC said, "We are really looking forward to hosting Gumbo YaYa. This process will definitely help to continue conversations black women and girls are having about how we relate to each other. We hope this process helps mothers, daughters, and sisters strengthen their relationships with each other and the larger communities."

For more information about Gumbo YaYa visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com, or email bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com.

--
Ebony N. Golden, MFA, MA
Creative Director
bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com

Hire Betty's Daughter for your arts consulting needs!
"creating radical expressiveness in community"

Check out...Gumbo Yaya/or this is why we speak in tongues
"Creative Healing and Expression for Women of the Diaspora"
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2009-01-21T12:23:00.001-05:00

Greetings Gumbo YaYa Supporters,

Last week's session "Brilliant Tomorrows: Sister(ing) as Communal Creative Performance" was a success! We had 20 women in attendance as we engaged diverse ways of practicing sisterhood.

This sunday features an extended gourd making and percussion workshop, HandWork to HeartWork" led by Connie Leeper of Kannapolis, NC. The session will begin at 2:30 and end 6:30. All programs happen at Healing with CAARE, Inc on 214 Broadway St in Durham, NC.

We are also pleased to announce that two of our youth, Nadirah and Bryonna, will lead us in a meditation and visualization activity to start the workshop.

As always, dinner and child care will be provided.

Additionally, please see the link to more pictures of the Everlasting Life workshop from our second week. Thank you sister Courtney Powell-X for the photography work.

http://picasaweb.google.com/sis.courtney/GumboYaya?authkey=vLMkbfNO_IU#5293620404058243410

Please visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com and leave us a note!

2009-01-11T14:32:00.001-05:00

Greetings Gumbo YaYa Supporters,

Below you will find upcoming Sister Circle information. Please forward to Black women and girls you think may be interested in coming.

As with all circles, refreshments and child care are provided.
For more information, visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com or bettysdaughterarts@gmail.com

Jan. 18. “Brilliant Tomorrows: Sister(ing) as Communal Creative Performance”
Ebony Noelle Golden

Workshop Description- How are black women taught to sister? What are the some of the rites, rituals, and performances of sistering? How can we honor the space and practice of sistering? In this session, participants will engage in poetry, performance, music, and movement activities that help us create a vocabulary for active, present, and radical sistering.

The workshop is informed by the work and scholarship of Alice Coltrane, Romare Bearden, Ntozake Shange, Augosto Boal, Anna Deveare Smith, Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Soyini Madison, among others.

Jan. 25 “HandWork to HeartWork” Gourd Making & Percussion Connie Leeper

On the surface, this workshop is about music and gourd making. On a deeper level, it is more about connection…connection to ourselves, playfulness, imagination, culture, health and community. No experience necessary. Must be willing to be open, welcoming & ready to learn and teach. This workshop only requires that you bring your whole self into a process of intentional creativity.

Feb. 1 “Mother. Ourselves.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Zachari Curtis What happens when a life’s work stretches to include many lifetimes and multiple bodies? What models of communication allow those of us living in the flesh on this plane to access the imperatives of ancestors and the unborn? This exploration of the practice of spiritual daughterhood demonstrates and investigates radical connection as a calling and a strategy for healing and action.

Presented by three spiritual daughters of Durham visionary artist, educator and now ancestor Nayo Watkins, “Mother. Ourselves.” is both a performative tribute to Mama Nayo’s life and energy and a model for communication across the presumed limits of life itself. Mama Nayo understood the necessity of the creative process to radical political struggle and healing. This is how she lives with us now; reaching forward and back, moving away and drawing us together.

Time, distance, dis(ease), death, scarcity if asserted as essential, linear, terminal, logical, confine individuals and disrupt communication across seemingly impermeable barriers. What we know already is that we already have everything we need in order to reclaim, remember, revision ourselves, together, free. As Nayo put it, “You already know all you need to know… It’s in your bones.”

Feb. 8 “In The Beginning Was Her Word: Empowering Women One Story At A Time”

Dr. Anjail Rashida Ahmad

Over the millennia, women have held societies together word of mouth, hand to hand and vision by vision simply by the words issued from their tongues. The word or the power of one’s intention spoken into existence is the essence of who we are and can be a force that drives the unfolding of our life experiences. This speaking often takes the shape of stories both narrative and poetic. It’s the power of one’s own story articulated and shared that can have a most transforming effect throughout our societies both private and public.

In this workshop, Dr. Ahmad will lead us in uncovering the essence of the words lying at the bottom of our own hearts and use them to formulate our stories/poems/womanifestas-what desires to be spoken that has not yet been uttered.

Participants should bring a photograph of themselves preferably from the remote past. Use black and white if you have it or copy with a black and white copier. Together we will write autobiographically/biographically, herstorically inspired poems. Come prepared to be reaffirmed, to search-out the words and images, to gather and shape them and to share that which has the power to make us whole.

2009-01-06T19:30:00.001-05:00

Get Hip and Get Your Necessary Dose of Gumbo YaYa!

January 5, 2009 –A New Year and new process to get the job done
On this new show in the New Year, we talk about upcoming events and setting goals for 2009.
Phyllis Coley, editor of Spectacular magazine and Ebony Noelle Golden creative director of Gumbo Yaya gives us a lot of new information to think about. Phyllis shares info on the upcoming Jan 31 celebration of Martin Luther King in Durham. Ebony tells us about the weekly sisterhood circles that she is guiding. Each of my guests use a process unique to them that I know you will find interesting and can be used as a guide to strengthen your own goals in 2009. Join the conversation and send me your goals that you have set for 2009.

Visit at www.richardbrownshow.com to listen to and download the podcast.

Visit Gumbo YaYa at www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

2008-12-29T03:01:00.001-05:00

re/memories

2008-11-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

21:40 - i hear you breathing for me/ an embodied blues for megan williams

after performing and meditating on the most recent installation of "i hear you breath for me/ an embodied blues for megan williams" i wrote this...

1. she thinks she sees waterblood

steps pores wide with fear

her whiteness like magnified imagination

"and there was fake blood and a woman cut herself"

her neck (re)shocked red as she turns the corner

her mother can see the whole black woman unsliced

left hand trembling

2. we are not a/part

we are not a/part wearenota/part wearenota / part we arenota/ part

even if my last name is not williams even if i tell the story you choose to forget

even if the dollars come as drops instead of pours even if you dream a piece of

fabric is a brick wall even if i bang silence like a steel drum even if you wear

white male privlege like a badge of honor even if i make you remember what

you choose to forget even if the story incites a thick mucus to grow in the back

of your throat even if

3. when we hold fear like a lover and fold our tears into envelops that craddle our screams we pretend our necks are full of jazz and scorpio thunder we pretend our open parts are a diary of cinnamon sundays we pretend a shout is a shower of blessings we pretend plump hairs relaxed thin do not hold stories of our mothers and our mothers' mothers we pretend we can bury ourselves in books and lecutres and conferences and "study"

we pretend it is apart of our genetic makeup to be numb we pretend we can bury ourselves in good dick and good feelings and good wine and good deeds

we pretend it is apart of our genetic makeup to be bottomless we pretend we can bury ourselves in the blindness of never more we pretend we have paralized tonsils we pretend flesh does not burn and that we have forgotten how to decode black girl pain like it is not an opera written in our skin/tone

4. tattle tell tit your tongue will be slit and every little boy in town will have a little bit

- mama audre lorde

5. and the line i forgot...

mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb

mary had a little lamb whose fleece was whiiiiiii whhhhhhhhhhhh whhhhhhhhhhhi

whhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite as snow

-remixed nursery rhyme

6. after we wrap ourselves like a cacoon we are a dictionary of backs and fingers and southern sea sways we infuse our beating bodies into a blank space we are not mourning but recharging and thanking ourselves for continuing the journey

7. the brothers pray approach slowly contemplate some revolutionary shit pray request hugs dance their frustration dance their honesty about not knowing what to do i am thankful for the stillness of their eyes and how they listen with their palms

2008-10-27T14:58:00.002-04:00

October 27, 2008
Gumbo YaYa/ or this is why we speak in tongues travels~~~~south!

It is that time, again. Last year Gumbo YaYa/ or this is why we speak in tongues worked magic in NYC. Almost a year to date, I sent out this email to women for support of this so fresh and so necessary improvisational, sista-circle, healing, performance opportunity.

I am Ebony Golden currently living in Manhattan and working as an arts consultant and performer. Over the last year, I had the wonderful pleasure of working with a beautiful group of women who helped me think through what Womanist Performance Methodology and Practice is about. I had the opportunity to study with, learn from, and make trouble with some of the flyest sistas around. We honored ourselves. We were able to be honest. And we participated as we could. I would not have graduated without them.

I add these sistas to my infinitely growing family of sistas around the country. I am so blessed to work and dream with you all. Thank you Ayanna, Geneva, Joi, Cammile, Chelsea, RonAmber, Crystal, Tonya, Samantha, and everyone else who participated along with the rest of my family in DC, TX, GA, NC, IL CA, LA, and in other spaces. You hold me up, thank you.

It is time to begin the 2nd cycle of Gumbo YaYa! Through the generous funding and support of SpiritHouse-NC, North Carolina Humanities Council, Healing with CAARE the 2nd cycle will happen in Durham, NC.

I am dedicated to my healing, the healing of the women in my family and extended family, and the world. This is a process we are creating everywhere, let's continue to tap in together and see what shifts.

This process will have a few opportunities for performance, live and virtual, but mostly I am interested in articulating a poetics of womanist performance process and methodology that can be reproduced by us every where to heal ourselves and this world.

NEED

1- Intern interested in arts management, performance, grassroots activism, media relations, and social justice. Applicant must be flexible, a self-starter, and dependable. Applicant must be based in Durham-NC (or close by). Course credit and possible stipend available.

NEED

Women and girls to participate. If you know of a school, community center, or pre-existing program who might be interested in collaborating, let me know.

NEED

I need you to tell our story. A small group of sistas who are not afraid to undertake this work with me, whether they understand exactly where it is headed or not. Sistas who enjoy movement, music, writing, photography, people, good food, performing, making a fuss about us (black women), and who are not afraid to say we (black women) matter anywhere in this world.

NEEDS

1. sistas to perform several times during a 12-week period and beyond
2. videographer/ photographer/ editor
3. choreographer
4. stage manager
5. 'zine designer
6. web designer

NEEDS
1. voice recorders, tapes
2. gift cards (Target would be excellent)
3. performance space
4. video recorders, tapes, dvd
5. money, frequent flyer miles, train tickets, gas cards!!!

did I say money? oh, and money!

NEEDS

Your stories. Some of you are far away from me right now. But I would love to interview you about you and your healing process. Let's set up some time for phone interviews. I travel often, and maybe we can get together and talk.

Every one is invited to NC in March 09 to see a pivotal step in this journey. Can't wait.

Please take a look at the updated web site and leave poems, videos, letters, and words of encouragement on the Poetic Healing page.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Cool Spirits and Calm Waters,

--
Ebony N. Golden, MFA, American University
Performance Studies MA, NYU
Gumbo Yaya/or this is why we speak in tongues
Creative Director
www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

www.communityspeak.wordpress.com

2008-09-04T23:24:00.001-04:00

2nd Annual Community Writing Intensive

2008-08-16T16:25:00.001-04:00

support critical resistance in durham, nc

2008-07-09T11:17:00.001-04:00

introducing betty's daughter arts collaborative

2008-06-17T13:27:00.000-04:00

acutonics or/ mic check one two one two/ a poem in praise of my mama

2008-05-25T12:51:00.006-04:00

One time fo the sho shot!!!
two times for the bass!!!!
three time for the treble!!!!
and fo time the race!!!!!

1.

auuuuuuuuuuuuuum
auuuuuuuuuuuuum
auuuuum
aum

shanti
shantiiiiii
shantiiiiiiiii
aum
aum
aum

peace

my introduction to sound theraphy came through gospel music. i joined our youth church choir at brentwood baptist church as a teenager. i remember feeling so full of life, enegry, fullness whenever we began to sing praise music. i felt like a fully present member of a community. resounding proclaiming professing my love for the creator.

scratch that

my introduction to the healing aspects of sound came as a girl growing up in my mother's house. saturdays were sacred. ripe with mama daughter check ing, good breakfasts, and cleaning. lots of cleaning against a backdrop of herbie hancock, earth wind and fire, marvin gaye, fleetwood mac, quincy jones, teddy pendergrass and many others. my mom would pop in an 8-track and crank up the turn tables and we would clean and dance and enjoy each other in our home space.

scratch that

pre-school, yes pre-school. four years old. i study at a the local pre school off 610. we are required to learn square dance. we dance and do-si-do and spin our partners and promenade and all that jazz. wow how stereotypically texan is this. although i love to dance, even at four, i was even more drawn to the sounds. i remember feeling like i was moving in and through the sound. looking and thinking back now, i think i felt there was another place on the other side of the sounds coming from the harmonica, guitar, banjo and such. i felt i could travel through sound like it travelled through me.

i still feel this is true.

but
scratch that

i want to remember what i heard in my mamas belly. i know now that the sound of her voice is one of the many ways i am linked to this amazing woman. i have always been able to tell her emotional state from the sound of her voice. the intonation her pronunciation of my name EEEEEEEEEbony or Ebonyyyyyyyyyy or eBony all meant different things to me growing up and even now. i know this relationship to the sound of my mamas voice and sound in general predates even the twitch in my daddy's smile and the lilt in my mamas laugh that eventually created me, neverthess i meditate on originary enTrances to this aural affair.

2.
point of clarification
when i said scratch three times in the last section of this poem, i was not negating a narrative memory i was actually inviting multiple layers of time and narrative. see hip hop see jazz see toni morrison for more information. reference the dj as well how she piles time on top of sound to make a new now/present/moment. think about how the event is a thing and remembering the event is a new thing and remixing them both is entirely a new thing as well. see and reference the universe's cycles ebbs and flows. reference a conversation with mama dr. ahmad about astrology and cosmic cycles~~~~how the cosmic cycles happen on time and constantly in time but each time a cycles happens the universe is not the same, nor are the people experiencing and moving through the cycles.

3.

this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
this is a poem about sound
(rest)

4.

listen to erykah badus music. not the lyrics, well yes the lyrics but the music music music. listen to pings, dings, tones, hesis, mantras, noise, silences, flourishes, breaks, holes, holds, and more. watch her make music on stage. gadgets, mixers, orchestrations, (she breaks music with commands like "hold on" cause some moments need silence while others may need sonic layers). pay attention to the how her voice mimics not only instruments but sounds we can find in nature. reference birds, wind, trees, sun sets, internal harmony and discord. reference the recent pics of badu positioned with pitch forks reminds me of ancient egyptian healing rods. these rods were used to create atune the body using the energetic vibrations that could be absorbed aurally or directly by the affected organ. see http://www.egyptianhealingrods.com/IntroFrames.html. reference andre 3000/the love below and the mantra "vibrate/ vibrate higher".

this talk about mimicry and nature and pitch and sound in general transports me back in time to what i just wrote about how sound travels the body and how the body travels through sound. so badus sound and possible mirroring of natural sounds is a way to think about recovery and travel. she sings during the intro and outro "the world is gonna turn/ the world is on and on" which references a constant cycle motion fluidity that mirrors how sound travels. "the sun's movement does not bend to the will of humans". i wonder how sound can be interpolated into this system as well.

what i am saying is sound therapy is a method of recovering self, as the self shifts and moves and remixes. sound is a way of collapsing the supposed present/past/future because it is all just time and through sound we can access the selves we want to be we can tune the sufferring parts of our selves and we can highlight our strengths. check out khametic rituals using sound. check out your grand mama humming spirituals. check out a babies laugh. check out a clear day in new york city. check out the sound of your lovers breath. check yourself.

5.

this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth
this is a poem about the earth

6.

i am entering a space of intense silence and sound
i am entering a space of intense meditation and prayer
i am entering a space of stillness and motion
i am entering a space of communion and solitude
i am recapturing
recovering
reliving
remixing
layering
outlining
splicing
recouping
revolving
shifting
soul sonics
alining arits
absorbing yellow green and white light
swallowing brillance
and breathing up butterflies

7.

boom tik boom boom boom tik
boom tik boom boom boom tik
boom tik boom boom boom tik
"think twice think twice"
boom tik boom booom boom tik
boom tik boom boom boom tik
"back in the day now/ back in the day
when things were cool/ well well well/
all we needed was pa pa pa pa pa pa da
all we needed was pa pa pa pa pa pa da"
~~~~~~~~~~

check the healing rods the hands of the Pa-Hru (or king/queen language of ancient kemit. please note: the term pharoh is an inaccurate translations. reference my beloved elders, queen afua, and others who taught me this).

2008-05-22T00:24:00.001-04:00

Women, Rock! and Politics Conference 2008
Institute for Women's Studies, UGA
Athens, Georgia

Everyone is welcome to this free conference. For information on local
accommodations, registration, and other details, go to http://www.uga.edu/iws/wrp08.html

Athens locals don't miss keynote performance by queer and feminist rock icon
Gretchen Phillips, 6pm Saturday
(http://www.queermusicheritage.us/aug2005.html) and after-conference party
with guest dj Melissa York.

Conference Program

Friday, May 30, Edge Hall, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, UGA

5:00 Opening reception

5:30 Welcome and Introductions

6:00 Fred Maus “52 Girls” A talk on the women of the B52s

7:00 Latin-American Scenes
Lesley Feracho , “Contesting the Nation :Women and Rock in Latin America”
Patricia Vergara “Funkeiras: Transgressing the Place of the Poor, Black, and
Female in Rio de Janeiro”

SATURDAY, May 31, Tasty World, downtown Athens

12:00 Brunch Buffet

1:00 Girls Rock Camps Collective, “Creativity, Community and Confidence
through Rock & Roll: Girls Rock Camps”

2:15 Rocking the Margins
Matt Jones, "(Re)discovering the Music of Judee Sill"
Sarah Cozort, “Women in Experimental Music”

3:00 Break

3:15 Stella Pace, “Riot Grrrl Self-Esteem Now: A Multimedia Performance”

4:00 Hip/Hop Feminisms
Ebony Noelle Golden, “Sonic Soul: Erykah Badu's Performance Practice”
Sarah Young Ngoh, “Black Motherhood in Hip/Hop and R&B Music”
Marnie Binfield, “Women’s Contributions to ‘Conscious Rap’”

5:45 Break

6:00 Keynote Performance/Presentation Gretchen Phillips

9:00- After-party at Tasty World with special DJ Melissa York, of The Butchies
midnite

UGA to host second annual conference on Women, Rock! and Politics

Athens, Ga.—The Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia is
hosting its second annual conference, Women, Rock and Politics, from Friday,
May 30 to Saturday, May 31.

This year’s conference brings together a great range of talks, images, and
performances on topics ranging from Girls Rock Camps, to hip hop feminism, to
the riot grrrl movement, to women in rock in Latin America.

The conference will begin on Friday at 5:00 p.m. with a reception and
presentations in Edge Hall at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music on the
University of Georgia campus, followed by a talk on the women of the B-52s by
renowned music scholar Fred Maus (UVA). Saturday's presentations and
performances, including keynote performance by rock icon Gretchen Phillips,
and conference after-party with guest dj Melissa York, will be at Tasty World in
downtown Athens. For a full program please visit www.uga.edu/iws.

The conference is free and open to the public. Edge Hall is located in the Hugh
Hodgson School of Music, Third Floor, at 250 River Rd on the eastside of
campus. Tasty World is located at 312 East Broad Street in downtown Athens,
Ga. For more information contact the Institute for Women’s Studies at 706-
542-2846.

Molly Moreland Myers
Public Relations Coordinator
Institute for Women's Studies
University of Georgia
706-542-0066 (voice)
706-542-0049 (fax)
momolly@uga.edu

Envisioning An Artist's Manifesta

2008-05-08T23:58:00.002-04:00

Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues:

Documenting Womanist Performance Methodology

iamnotaproject.wordpress.com

Envisioning an Artist’s Manifesta

Ebony Noelle Golden

I am the daughter of Pearl Glover, Bertha Sims, and Betty Sims. I am a Black woman who calls Houston, TX and Shreveport, LA home. I am a poet who writes and lives a poetic sensibility. I have many mamas, aunts, sistas, and nieces. Billie Sims, Shellie Sims, Dorothy Sims, Linda Sims, Cheryl McKnight, Nelma Hicks, Heather Hicks, Jayla Dancey, Joi Dancey, Jayna Dancey are some of the women and girl-children who inform who I am today. This manifesta is for them. Ashe o!

Culture

I guess that waltzes

Do not move me.

I have no sympathy

For symphonies.

I guess I hummed the blues too early

And spent too many midnights

Out wailing to the rain.

-Assata Shakur

In “The Quilt: Towards a twenty-first black feminist ethnography” Meida McNeal asserts, “The concept of diaspora in relation to Africa has undergone radical definitional shifts. Across these shifts in the use of diaspora as process, product, space and identity, the tropes of ‘African-ness’ and ‘blackness’ have been under constant negation, not solely on theoretical terrain but in actual embodied practice,” (60). I am intrigued and disoriented by the polyvalent nature of Blackness. This disorientation grounds me in an ongoing process that thinks about the violent nature of translation as a learned, expected and constantly re-imagined behavior in Black women’s daily experiences. As I engage language translation, I translate my body and my spirit. As I interact with others, I switch codes, “pass”, rub against identities that are not quite my own. The violent act of self-translation insists I ask, who’s language resides in my mouth? I struggle to locate myself in the ideas swirling around in my head. The indoctrination of the academy, the work of popular media outlets, the social fabric of this society all vie for space inside my body, and often win out over the desires, ideas, projects and processes that reside within the intimate space of my interior.

Is it possible to understand notions of Black womanhood in terms of the construction of language or “metalanguage”? Homi K. Bhabha reminds us, “The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enonce) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space” (270). With this in mind, I recognize my desire to write myself into a space, write space onto my body or write over/through the gap or “disjuncture”/disjunction/break that seems to separate Black women from the rest of the world. Writing can be a set of practices and actions that reconnect the self to the self, intimate and global communities.

The failure to write/act across the gap is one of the major failures of the women’s liberation or white feminist movement. In “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race” Evelyn Higginbotham quotes Elizabeth Spelman’s claim that, “White feminists typically discern two separate identities for black women, the racial and the gender, and conclude that the gender identity of black women is the same as their own: “In other words, the womanness underneath the black woman’s skin is a white woman’s and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through” (6). Additionally, bell hooks describes the failure of feminist coalition building between Black and white women. hooks states, “One reason white women active in the feminist movement were unwilling to confront racism was their arrogant assumption that their call for Sisterhood was a non-racist gesture. Many white women have said to me, “we wanted black women and other non-white women to join the movement,” totally unaware of their perception that they somehow “own” the movement, that they are the “hosts” inviting us as “guests” (53). I ask myself: what is the skin under my skin? What is the voice within my voice? This vacuum that theoretically separates the blackness from womanness, self from self, is the void I speak of/over/through. I need to know, quite literally, what are the societal and gravitational forces displacing me from myself?

I am a refugee in my own skin.

Higginbotham’s article thinks about race as language. She writes, “Race serves as a “global sign,” a “metalanguage,” since it speaks about and lends meaning to a host of terms and expressions, to myriad aspects of life that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of race” (5). In the case of Black women, one must consider what signifies us historically and contemporarily. What are the markers, traces, utterances that signal Black womanness? Hostense Spillers begins her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” with the following declaration, “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ ‘God’s ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium’ ” (65). Again words miss the gap. They contain instead of explicate who I am. There, in the definition, is another fissure I must leap across/out of the boundness of a commodified identity into the space of expansiveness. I find redemption in rejecting the “liminal” notions an constructions Black womanhood.

I speak her name

Mother

Mama

Mawu

Mawulisa

Ala

Jezanna

Songi

Mboze

Yemanja

Mbaba Mwana Waresa

Chi-Wara

Attempting to stretch my body across the gulf, stretching towards myself, stretching myself through translation is more than a kinesthetic or alchemic performance. It requires a seismic shift in the way the social constructs the intimate and the global constructs the individual. I agree with Renee Alexander Craft who believes, “African/black women have all too often been imagined, defined, labeled and packaged in ways that are at odds with who we are and understand ourselves to be” (56). The disjuncture is significant. This is why I am fixated on the sets of practices and the nuanced lexicon of Black women’s experiences. Not to limit our identity, but instead to bathe in the layered textures of our diversity. The representations and definitions are limiting, hurtful and sometimes backwards. Moreover, the definitions and representations are transmitted as truth largely by people who do not speak the same language I speak.

I am gravitating and maneuvering to the center of the universe. In order to transport myself through language and performance I first must start here, center stage. I want to stretch myself beyond the aforementioned terms. I am “Mother” but my identity, as Spillers insists, does not rest or begin with who or what I produce, rear or suckle. I speak across gulfs of legacy, trauma, kinship, futurity, expectancy, culture, body, space, and time to be seen or recognized by certain institutions or institutional representatives; but more so, to be recognized by myself. The issue of invisibility, or speaking oneself visible, resonates like the reverberating sound of a Buddhists’ singing bowl. Recently, I have begun to think about language as a set of ideas and actions in terms of the phenomenon of glossolalia, roughly translated as “speaking in tongues”.

This concept has been helpful in thinking about ideas and actions that speak to how specific individuals or communities linguistically and performatively engage with others. Amiri Baraka, in all his flawed brilliance and beauty, writes in Blues People “The spirits do not descend without music”. His ideas vocalize how spirit/soul/”re”memory/body are related to language and performance practices. I believe Black women are masters of glossolalic practices as we translate, not only the language the gods, the language of ourselves through our skins, actions and vocalizations.

Perhaps, Black womanhood is an avant-garde/experimental performance. Both the language, as I am writing and thinking about it, and Black womanhood push corporeal frontiers and urge ontological shifts in the manner in which human beings relate to sometimes hostile and other times lulling geographies. Blackness, as Adrian Piper, E. Patrick Johnson, and other notable scholars theorize, is just as slippery as the definitions of experimental/ avant-garde performance. Depending on where one is positioned or positions oneself on this stage called the globe, the United States, New York City, or some other space, Blackness looks and performs quite differently than one might assume.

E. Patrick Johnson teases out Blackness in Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Johnson writes, “Blackness, too, is slippery—ever beyond the reach of one’s grasp. Once you think you have a hold on it, it transforms into something else and travels in another direction. Its elusiveness does not preclude one from trying to fix it, to pin it down, however—for the pursuit of authenticity is inevitably an emotional and moral one.” (2) Johnson explicates how blackness serves as a means to wiggle out of the crawl space or what Marcus Wallace refers to as the “scrawl” space of identity as it is constructed by genetic and social structures.

I experience and negotiate this world through this corporeal and affective reality. Black skin, Black sensibilities, Black acts conflate with the dominant discourses and hegemonies and make a real substantive relationship with myself and other Black women a job I work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Although current scholarship suggests we are possibly transitioning into a post-racial moment, I am still here writing visibility across gulfs. I cannot be evacuated from this skin or this legacy. I suggest that constructions of Black womanhood be expressed through the cultural practice of gumbo ya ya as theorized by Luisah Teish. She writes, “Gumbo ya ya is a creole term that means “Everybody talks at once,” It is stream of consciousness, it is argumentative, and it is loud! The person speaks comments on the subject at hand, any stories from the past and future probabilities that are seemingly relevant to the subject, the immediate environment, and their own inner process, all within the same unpunctuated paragraph. While the principal person is speaking, all other participants(who cannot truly be called “listeners”) are preparing what they’re going to say next (which cannot truly be called a ‘response’). The next person acquires “the floor” simply by cutting in and speaking louder than the present speaker. The new “floor master” is allowed a sentence or two and then gumbo ya ya starts up again” (139-140).

Gumbo ya ya, perhaps traces its genealogy back to the origins of the southern dish that bares the same name. Gumbo ya ya is a stew. Depending on the region, gumbo ya ya may contain different ingredients including shrimp, sausage, chicken, crab, and a myriad of vegetables. The main and most fundamental component of gumbo ya ya is the roux or what I call the soul of the dish. The roux is the gravy that holds all the ingredients together. Again, depending on one’s location the roux maybe either a tomato based gravy or a brown gravy made from the fat rendering of a piece of cooked meat. Gumbo ya ya features and highlights a menagerie of distinct and discernable flavors that collaborate to create an entire sensory experience.

Teish’s ideas about gumbo ya ya are similar to those theorized in “The Quilt” written by a collective of sista-scholars who matriculated through various degree programs at Northwestern University. The essay articulates theory and praxis for a contemporary and critical Black feminist ethnography. These notions of quilting, stitching together, stirring up all inform my current project, Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues: Documenting Womanist Performance Methodology. Media McNeal unravels a series of questions that problematize process such as Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues in “The Quilt”. She asks, “How do we – as scholars who are cultural workers – complicate debates about ownership, tradition, innovation and authority by tracking some bits of culture and eclipsing others? How does what we craft on paper and in performance intervene, making some small dent in established perceptions of what we thought we knew or what we ignored up until now” (73)? McNeal’s questions are indeed relevant and necessary in untangling such a complicated historical and contemporary narrative. Her questions also suggest that work must be done to hone methodological practices approaches to Black womanhood that critically and responsibly engage such issues that pertain to the “intimate histories” and cultural practices of Black women. Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues desires to engage similar questions that further complicate scholarly and artistic engagement in and through Black womanhood.

Gumbo Yaya/ or this is why we speak in tongues is an artistic and spiritual work conceived by members of the Black Women in Performance Studies Work Group at New York University, under my facilitation and desire to spend a year in meditation of the issues articulated throughout this manifesta. Together we actualized Gumbo Yaya to highlight black women’s cultural production in relationship to community, self, legacy, spirituality and womanism. The piece was developed collaboratively over a six month period with women scholars and activists in New York City, Durham, NC, Atlanta, Georgia, and Houston, TX. Inter-generational narratives of spirituality and healing ground this creative and scholarly process, along with performances of healing and movement.

Gumbo Yaya/ or this is why we speak in tongues draws on the rich legacy of womanism as articulated by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogun-yemi and Alice Walker among others. Additionally, this process shapes and defines the practice of womanism as it performed presently by younger generations of black women. By galvanizing the energy of our foremothers, we intend to “make something new” as it is suggested through the artistic production and scholarship of Anna Deavere Smith.

Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues works through Black women’s cultural practices as a means of highlighting the diverse experiences of the participants while enjoying experiences of solidarity and unity. This exploration critically engages notions of authenticity, authorship, voice, and expressivity as we question the agency and efficacy among us. We reclaim the legitimacy of our experiences and the power to narrate our stories as we live them in our own tongues and through our own language and practices.

i don’t wanna write

in english or spanish

i wanna sing make you dance

like the bata dance scream

twitch hips wit me cuz

i done forgot all abt words

aint got no definitions

i wanna whirl

with you

our whole body

wrapped like a ripe mango

- Ntozake Shange

Shange writes about the importance of nuanced articulation of identity in her essay “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”. Shange argues, “You never doubt bessie smith’s voice. I cd not say to you: that’s chaka khan singing ‘empty bed blues’. Not cuz chaka khan can’t sing empty bed blues/ but cuz bessie smith sound a certain way. Her way. If tina turner stood right here next to me & simply said ‘yes’…we wd all know/ no matter how much I love her/ no matter what kinda wig-hat I decide to wear/ my ‘yes’ will never be tina’s ‘yes’” (2). Ultimately the work of Gumbo ya ya/ or this is why we speak in tongues, in some ways, is exactly what Shange describes. The process provides a space for Black women rehydrate the flattened identities mapped onto or voices and bodies. The process provides a space through shared legacies through multiple tongues and movements that speak a communal truth.

Bibliography

Afua, Queen Sacred Woman. New York, NY: Random House, 2000.

Baraka, Amiri Blues People: Negro Music in White America. LeRoi Jones, 1963.

Collins, Patricia Hill Black Feminist Thought. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Craft, Renee Alexander, McNeal, Meida, Mwangola, Mshai, Zabriskie, Queen Meccasia. “The

Quilt: Towards a twenty-first century black feminist ethnography”. Performance Research. Vol. 12. Issue 3. Sept. 2007. http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1352-8165&volume=12&issue=3&spage=55.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist

Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”

University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1989.

http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:2507/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/uchclf1989&id=1&size=2&collection=journals&index=journals/uchclf.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett. African American Literary Criticism. Twayne Publishers: New York, NY,

1999.

Hine, Darlene Clark, King, Wilma, Reed, Linda. Eds. “We Specialize in the WhollyImpossible:”

A Reader in Black Women’s History. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1995.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984.

Johnson, E. Patrick Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Moten, Fred. “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape: Preface for a solo by Miles Davis”

Women & Performance: a Journal of feminist theory, vol. 17, No. 2, July 2007, 217-246.

Piper, Adrian. Cornered. 1988. Google Video. 19 Apr. 2008.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6756190809617046211&pr=goog-sl.

Piper, Adrian. Everything. Feb. 2008. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York. Apr. 2008.

Piper, Adrian. “Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object.” Out of Order, Out of Sight: Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, p 29-53.Piper,

Shakur, Asatta. Assata. Zed Light Books: Chicago, IL, 1987.

Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.

McMillian Publishing:New York, NY, 1977.

Shange, Ntozake. Nappy Edges. St. Martin’s Press: New York, NY, 1972.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987), pp. 65-81

Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals.

Harper Collins: New York, NY, 1985.

Wade-Gayles, Gloria. My Soul is a Witness: African-American Women’s Spirituality. Beacon

Press: Boston, MA, 1995.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Orlando, FL,

1967.

Wallace, Marcus O. Constructing the black masculine; identity and ideality in African

American men’s literature and culture, 1775-1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

thank you adrian piper for everything~~~Adrian Piper’s “Cornered” and “Everything”: Debunking Notions of the Post-Racial Moment

2008-05-03T06:33:00.003-04:00

Adrian Piper’s “Cornered” and “Everything”: Debunking Notions of the Post-Racial Moment
(for New Orleans, Meghan Williams, Sean Bell, et. al)

Maybe, just possibly, blackness is an avant gard/experimental performance; just as performances that push corporeal frontiers or urge ontological shifts in the manner in which human beings relate to sometimes hostile and other times lulling geographies. Blackness, as Adrain Piper, E. Patrick Johnson, and other noted scholars theorize, is just as slippery as the definitions of experimental/ avant gard performance. Depending on where one is positioned or positions oneself on this stage called the globe, the United States, New York City, or some other space, Blackness looks and performs quite differently than one might assume.
E. Patrick Johnson teases out the complexities of this issue in his book Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. In the introduction, Johnson writes, “Blackness, too, is slippery—ever beyond the reach of one’s grasp. Once you think you have a hold on it, it transforms into something else and travels in another direction. Its elusiveness does not preclude one from trying to fix it, to pin it down, however—for the pursuit of authenticity is inevitably an emotional and moral one.” (2) Johnson reveal here how blackness serves as a means to wiggle out of the crawl space or what Marcus Wallace refers to as the “scrawl” space of identity as it is constructed by genetic and social structures.

While I am sure Blackness oscillates, wiggles, rewinds and “sidewinds” as Richard Schechner speaks of as a characteristic of performance, Blackness still is. I cringe at the thought of not being able to index at the site of collective and “intimate history”, joys, traumas, cultural practices and kinship Blackness. I am concerned about writers, thinkers and artists who assert we are in moving into a post-racial moment. Who decides this? Who is empowered to make such decisions? And what cost, if I choose to accept this thrust, do I pay not move pass this skin and this experience in this skin and these memories and these relationships to jump on the post –racial moment.

In “Cornered” Adrian Piper bursts the collective bubble of white and Black America. She reveals that most of us are Black. Furthermore, she suggests that Blackness is a dilemma. At first I was unnerved by this presumed assumption but soon she revealed what I interpreted as the real problem. The issue is what are our strategies for dealing with our collective Blackness? This, at first, I believed was directed solely at the white people watching the video, but Blackness is a genetic and social fact Black folks have to deal with as well. Piper proposes that white people should not assume everyone is white or that everyone wants to be white. Furthermore, she hints to the Black folks who may be watching that we should be doing something about this Blackness issue as well. We should be insisting, resisting, proclaiming and performing our Blackness no matter the social costs. For Piper, passing is not an option. The film concludes with an invocation—Welcome to the struggle, the “beautiful struggle” for wholeness and Blackness and voice.
May 2, 2008. I am still a little groggy from pulling an all-nighter. An organization called Creative Time is on Campus for the “Everything” project. The project centers around Piper’s most recent artistic work that was recently installed at Elizabeth Gallery. Creative Time is on campus painting “everything will be taken away” on people’s foreheads with henna paint. Barabara Pollack’s article “Adrian Piper, “Everything” includes an important quote about Pipers work. She quotes, “Once you have taken everything away from a man, he is no longer in your power. He is free. “ She adds, “This quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the inspiration for Adrian Piper’s “Everything” series.” I planned to have my forehead painted, but nevertheless I slept instead.

I ventured to the gallery to see the exhibit. Having admired Piper’s work from afar it was a little disheveling seeing it so up-close and personal. Stark white walls and the ominous phrase disorient me. This is clearly about space, power, race in the Minimalist tradition she is known for. A hard to make out video of Meghan Williams are situated in one corner. The mirror watches, or reflects, me as I watch the video. I feel tugged and pulled as if Piper is standing here asking interrogating me in the calm and subdued voice she utilized in “Cornered”. She asks, “What are you going to do for Meghan?” My kinship with her, Piper and Williams, makes me even more ill-at-ease. I cannot make out her voice. I cannot make out my own.

I am not in a dark room with several chairs. I see a grid and dots, dancing a freaky choreography. The dots are connected by lines. I feel alone. Perhaps, the dots represent my relation to those around me. Again the Minimalist aesthetic employed by Piper, makes me feel the room is naked and that I am taking up a lot of space. These open spaces make me feel as if she intentionally left the room bare so that I can think, not so much about the art, but my relationship to it.
Piper’s work is about global positioning. It is about finger pointing. Although in “Cornered”, Piper says she does not mean to antagonize her audience I believe she does , and rightfully so. Everything has been taken away, and now even Blackness is being stolen by progressives, liberals, artists, scholars who choose not to deal with the messiness and presence of it.

Suggested Media and Readings
Sweet Honey in the Rock “We Who Believe in Freedom”
Johnson, E. Patrick, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
www.elizabethdeegallery.com
www.adrainpiper.com
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/performance/piper.html
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/art/27943/adrian-piper-everything
see "Cornered" posted to the blog

ebony noelle golden, mfa
furiousflower@gmail.com

gumbo yaya (the film)

2008-05-02T21:15:00.001-04:00

visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com for more information

Gumbo Yaya (the film)

2008-05-02T21:14:00.001-04:00

visit www.iamnotaproject.wordpress.com for more information

thank you adrain piper...for everything

2008-04-24T14:40:00.000-04:00

thank you adrian piper...for everything

2008-04-24T13:49:00.001-04:00

Learn more about Adrian Piper at - www.adrianpiper.com

Dear Editor:

Please don’t call me a black artist.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American artist.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me a woman artist.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female artist.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female artist.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black artist.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and African American.

Please don’t call me a black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a black female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and African American.

Dear Editor,
I hope you will bring to my attention any permutations I have overlooked.
I write to inform you that
I have earned the right to be called an artist.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called an artist and philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher and artist.
I have earned the right to call myself anything I like.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Adrian Piper

1 January 2003

blackness, art, politcs oh my!!!

2008-04-05T00:22:00.003-04:00

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 30, 2008
IN the 1970s the African-American artist Adrian Piper donned an Afro wig and a fake mustache and prowled the streets of various cities in the scowling, muttering guise of the Mythic Being, a performance-art version of a prevailing stereotype, the black male as a mugger, hustler, gangsta.

Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image

Paul Fortin/Pope.L
The artist William Pope.L, on the cover of the catalog to his 2003 retrospective exhibition, “eRacism.” More Photos »

Multimedia
Slide Show
On Race and Art In the photographs that resulted you can see what she was up to. In an era when some politicians and much of the popular press seemed to be stoking racial fear, she was turning fear into farce — but serious, and disturbing, farce, intended to punch a hole in pervasive fictions while acknowledging their power.

Recently a new kind of Mythic Being arrived on the scene, the very opposite of the one Ms. Piper introduced some 30 years ago. He doesn’t mutter; he wears business suits; he smiles. He is by descent half black African, half white American. His name is Barack Obama.

On the rancorous subject of the country’s racial history he isn’t antagonistic; he speaks of reconciliation, of laying down arms, of moving on, of closure. He is presenting himself as a 21st-century postracial leader, with a vision of a color-blind, or color-embracing, world to come.

Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction.

In a recent solo debut at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea a young artist named Rashid Johnson created a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals, a cross between Mensa and the Masons. At first uplift seemed to be the theme. The installation was framed by a sculpture resembling giant cross hairs. Or was it a microscope lens, or a telescope’s? The interpretive choice was yours. So was the decision to stay or run. Here was art beyond old hot-button statements, steering clear of easy condemnations and endorsements. But are artists like Mr. Johnson making “black” art? Political art? Identity art? There are no answers, or at least no unambiguous ones.

Since Ms. Piper’s Mythical Being went stalking in the 1970s — a time when black militants and blaxploitation movies reveled in racial difference — artists have steadily challenged prevailing constructs about race.

As multiculturalism entered mainstream institutions in the 1980s, the black conceptualist David Hammons stayed outdoors, selling snowballs on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk. And when, in the 1990s, Robert Colescott was selected as the first African-American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, he brought paintings of figures with mismatched racial features and skin tones, political parables hard to parse.

At the turn of the present millennium, with the art market bubbling up and the vogue for identity politics on the wane, William Pope.L — the self-described “friendliest black artist in America” — belly-crawled his way up Broadway, the Great White Way, in a Superman outfit, and ate copies of The Wall Street Journal.

Today, as Mr. Obama pitches the hugely attractive prospect of a postracial society, artists have, as usual, already been there, surveyed the terrain and sent back skeptical, though hope-tinged, reports. And you can read those reports in art all around New York this spring, in retrospective surveys like “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” currently at the P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, in the up-to-the-minute sampler that is the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in gallery shows in Chelsea and beyond, and in the plethora of art fairs clinging like barnacles to the Armory Show on Pier 94 this weekend.

“Wack!” is a good place to trace a postracial impulse in art going back decades. Ms. Piper is one of the few African-American artists in the show, along with Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady. All three began their careers with abstract work, at one time the form of black art most acceptable to white institutions, but went on to address race aggressively.

In a 1980 performance video, “Free, White and 21,” Ms. Pindell wore whiteface to deliver a scathing rebuke of art-world racism. In the same year Ms. O’Grady introduced an alter ego named “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” who, dressed in a beauty-queen gown sewn from white formal gloves, crashed museum openings to protest all-white shows. A few years later Ms. Piper, who is light skinned, began to selectively distribute a printed calling card at similar social events. It read:

Dear Friend,

I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are not black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.

I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.

Sincerely yours,

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Although these artists’ careers took dissimilar directions, in at least some of their work from the ’70s and ’80s they all approached race, whiteness as well as blackness, as a creative medium. Race is treated as a form of performance; an identity that could, within limits, be worn or put aside; and as a diagnostic tool to investigate social values and pathologies.

Ms. Piper’s take on race as a form of creative nonfiction has had a powerful influence on two generations of African-Americans who, like Mr. Obama, didn’t experience the civil rights movement firsthand, and who share a cosmopolitan attitude toward race. In 2001 that attitude found corner-turning expression in “Freestyle,” an exhibition organized at the Studio Museum in Harlem by its director, Thelma Golden.

When Ms. Golden and her friend the artist Glenn Ligon called the 28 young American artists “postblack,” it made news. It was a big moment. If she wasn’t the first to use the term, she was the first to apply it to a group of artists who, she wrote, were “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”

The work ranged from mural-size images of police helicopters painted with hair pomade by Kori Newkirk, who lives in Los Angeles, to computer-assisted geometric abstract painting by the New York artist Louis Cameron. Mr, Newkirk’s work came with specific if indirect ethnic references; Mr. Cameron’s did not. Although “black” in the Studio Museum context, they would lose their racial associations in an ethnically neutral institution like the Museum of Modern Art.

Ethnically neutral? That’s just a code-term for white, the no-color, the everything-color. For whiteness is as much — or as little — a racial category as blackness, though it is rarely acknowledged as such wherever it is the dominant, default ethnicity. Whiteness is yet another part of the postracial story. Like blackness, it has become a complicated subject for art. And few have explored it more forcefully and intimately than Nayland Blake.

Mr. Blake, 48, is the child of a black father and a white mother. In various performance pieces since the 1990s he has dressed up as a giant rabbit, partly as a reference to Br’er Rabbit of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, a wily animal who speaks in Southern black dialect and who survives capture by moving fast and against expectations.

In 2001 Mr. Blake appeared in a video with another artist, AA Bronson. Each had his face slathered with cake frosting, chocolate in Mr. Blake’s case, vanilla in Mr. Bronson’s. When then two men exchanged a long kiss, the colors, and presumably the flavors, began to blend. Shared love, the implication was, dissolves distinctions between “black” and “white,” which, as racial categories, are cosmetic, superficial.

As categories they are also explosive. In 1984, when Mr. Hammons painted a poster of the Rev. Jesse Jackson as a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian and exhibited it outdoors in Washington, the piece was trashed by a group of African-American men. Mr, Hammons intended the portrait, “How Ya Like Me Now,” as a comment on the paltry white support for Mr. Jackson’s presidential bid that year. Those who attacked it assumed the image was intended as an insult to Mr. Jackson.

More recently, when Kara Walker cut out paper silhouettes of fantasy slave narratives, with characters — black and white alike — inflicting mutual violence, she attracted censure from some black artists. At least some of those objecting had personal roots in the civil rights years and an investment in art as a vehicle for racial pride, social protest and spiritual solace.

Ms. Walker, whose work skirts any such overt commitments, was accused of pandering to a white art market with an appetite for images of black abjection. She was called, in effect, a sellout to her race.

In a television interview a few weeks ago, before he formed plans to deliver his speech on race, Mr. Obama defended his practice of backing off from discussion of race in his campaign. He said it was no longer a useful subject in the national dialogue; we’re over it, or should be.

But in fact it can be extremely useful. There is no question that his public profile has been enhanced by his Philadelphia address, even if the political fallout in terms of votes has yet to be gauged.

Race can certainly be used to sell art too, and the results can be also be unpredictable. As with politics, timing is crucial.

In 1992 the white artist team Pruitt-Early (Rob Pruitt and Walter Early) presented a gallery exhibition called “The Red Black Green Red White and Blue Project.” Its theme was the marketing of African-American pop culture, with an installation of black-power posters, dashiki cloth and tapes of soul music bought in Harlem.

What might, at a later time or with different content, have been seen as a somewhat dated consumerist critique proved to be a public relations disaster. The artists were widely condemned as racist and all but disappeared from the art world.

Eight years later, with the cooling of identity politics, a show called “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage” arrived, with no apparent critical component, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. An array of fashion images, videos and artifacts associated with stars like the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott and Tupac Shakur, it was assumed to be a welcoming (if patronizing) gesture to the museum’s local African-American audience. Yet its appearance coincided with the general massive marketing of hip-hop culture to middle-class whites, a phenomenon that Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Early had been pointing to.

Were Pruitt-Early postblack artists ahead of their time, offering a new take on race, as a movable feast that collided with older, essentialist attitudes? If so, they would probably find plenty of company now in artists who stake out terrain both black and postblack, white and postwhite.

Mr. Pope.L (he who crawled up Broadway) does so with a posture of radical outsiderness that cancels bogus notions of racial or cultural essence. Basically he short-circuits the very concept of what an artist, black or white, “should” be. He smiles as he inches up the street on all fours; he uncomplainingly devours news of money he’ll never have. He paints murals with peanut butter and makes sculpture from Pop-Tarts, the stuff of welfare meals. In many ways his main subject would seem to be class, not race. Yet race is everywhere in his art.

He works with mostly white materials — mayonnaise, milk, flour — but he also runs the Black Factory, a mobile workshop-van equipped to transform any object, no matter what color, into a “black” object. How? By covering it with cheap black paint.

For a retrospective at the Maine College of Art in Portland in 2003, Mr. Pope.L presented a performance piece with the optimistic title “eRacism,” but that was entirely about race-based conflict. In a photograph in the show’s catalog, he has the word written in white on his bare black chest. Were he pale-skinned, it might have been all but invisible.

Whereas Mr. Pope.L has shaped himself into a distinctive racial presence, certain other artists of color are literally built from scratch. A Miami artists collective called BLCK, in the current Whitney Biennial, doesn’t really exist. The archival materials attributed to it documenting African American life in the 1960s is actually the creation of single artist: Adler Guerrier, who was born in Haiti in 1975.

Projects by Edgar Arceneaux, who is also in the biennial, have included imaginary visual jam sessions with the jazz visionary Sun Ra and the late Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. Earlier in this art season, a white artist, Joe Scanlan, had a solo gallery show using the fictional persona of a black artist, Donelle Woolford. Ms. Woolford was awarded at least one appreciative review, suggesting that, in art at least, race can be independent of DNA.

The topic of race and blood has always been an inflammatory one in this country. Ms. Piper broached it in a 1988 video installation and delivered some bad news. Facing us through the camera, speaking with the soothing composure of a social worker or grief counselor, she said that, according to statistics, if we were white Americans, chances were very high that we carried at least some black blood. That was the legacy of slavery. She knew we would be upset. She was sorry. But was the truth. The piece was titled “Cornered.”

And are we upset? I’ll speak for myself; it’s not a question. Of course not. Which is a good thing, because the concept of race in America — the fraught fictions of whiteness and blackness— is not going away soon. It is still deep in our system. Whether it is or isn’t in our blood, it’s in our laws, our behavior, our institutions, our sensibilities, our dreams.

It’s also in our art, which, at its contrarian and ambiguous best, is always on the job, probing, resisting, questioning and traveling miles ahead down the road.

2008-04-02T15:01:00.002-04:00

ok can i just say, e. badu "carries" fools like tavis smiley and they don't even know it.

goodness,
read on!

Erykah Badu
original airdate April 25, 2005

Erykah Badu has been called an uncompromising, brilliant artist. Growing up on '60s and '70s R&B, the Texas native wrote her first song at age 7. Her '97 debut CD, Baduizm, went platinum and won multiple awards. After some time out of the spotlight, Badu returned in '03 with Worldwide Underground. She's established a growing film career, with turns in Cider House Rules and House of D. Badu maintains strong ties to Dallas, TX with her nonprofit group B.L.I.N.D. (Beautiful Love Incorporated Non Profit Development).

TOPICS Music

Erykah Badu
Tavis: Erykah Badu is a four-time Grammy winner who burst onto the music scene back in 1997 with her terrific debut CD 'Baduizm.' Critics have praised her music for its unique combination of R&B, soul, jazz, and funk, but she's also a talented actress who won acclaim for a role you might recall in the Oscar-winning film 'The Cider House Rules.' Her latest movie is the David Duchovny-directed 'House of D.' The film is in theaters around the country even as we speak. Here now, a scene from 'House of D.'

Lady: And if you can walk, you can slow dance. Show me.

Tommy: No. Not out here in public.

Lady: I don't see no public.

Tommy: Well, come on. There's no music.

Lady: Imagine some music. You see that pole over there? That pole? Yes, that pole. Look at the pole. Walk toward the pole. You want this pole. No. Don't start your hands down at the ass. Work your way down.

Tavis: 'Look at the pole. Walk toward the pole. You want this pole.'

Erykah Badu: Right. You want the pole.

Tavis: You want this pole. Erykah Badu, nice to see you.

Badu: You, too.

Tavis: When David Duchovny was on this program a few weeks ago, he told me a funny story when the two of you were talking about the role for 'House of D.' He said you came in with a huge Afro. He was saying to you at the end of the conversation, 'Erykah, I like the look. If you could just keep that Afro until we shoot the movie, that'd be perfect, 'cause it fits perfectly for the role.'

Badu: Or he could keep it. Make sure it doesn't change.

Tavis: Make sure it doesn't change. He didn't know it wasn't real to begin with.

Badu: Uh-uh.

Tavis: Yeah. How do you decide what you're gonna do with your hair on a daily basis? All right? You got that, Jonathan?

Badu: How do I decide?

Tavis: How do you decide on a daily basis how you gonna rock this thing?

Badu: I don't give it a lot of thought, you know. It just--

Tavis: Are you trying to tell me there's no thought put into this?

Badu: No. It's just functional art, you know. It's just saying, well, you give thought to the tie.

Tavis: But I actually plan this stuff, though. I try to match the colors.

Badu: Did you lay it out on the bed... ...last night?

Tavis: You know what? Something like that. It wasn't last night. But this morning, yeah. I get up, try to match the color with the-- And you just do your thing.

Badu: Yeah.

Tavis: I like that, though. Functional art.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: How much--on a serious note--how much of your hairstyle is part of your whole aesthetic, part of your image? How much does it play in, do you think? 'Cause everybody talks about it all the time.

Badu: I think the people would tell me that more than I can tell me that. Because I just come as me, which is a part of, you know, the art. So I think maybe it plays a big part, because it's a little to the left sometime, and eclectic, you know. I think it's maybe fascinating to some people. But you know...

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: I don't know. You tell me.

Tavis: Well, I ain't got a problem with it. It's fasc--It's a very good question. I'll answer it if you want me to answer it seriously. It's fascinating to me, because whenever I hear Erykah Badu is about to make an appearance, I immediately know that I want to tune in, to see what she's gonna look like. So it works. If there's any-- I mean, creatively, if there's any thought that goes behind, 'Let's my look to get people to pay attention,' then, if that was part of the plan, it works. Every time I hear you've come into-- When you came on the set today, I'm like, 'I can't wait to see her walk on, just to see what her hair is gonna be like.' So it works. But enough about your hair. Let's talk about your work. You are, you know, I assume-- I could be wrong--pretty picky and choosy about the roles you play.

Badu: Mm-hmm.

Tavis: Just as you are about the kind of music that you play. You don't put no stuff together. You work through this. Tell me how you go about deciding what roles you want to play and how you're actually navigating your career through this acting thing.

Badu: I guess first it has to be, um... To me, I like period pieces, not in this moment now.

Tavis: What attracts you to period pieces? Why do you like those?

Badu: I don't know. I can't say exactly what it is, because I've only had three roles in film. But I think it's probably the imagination of it, you know. It gives you an opportunity to be creative and pretend. And that's what acting is. If I could be from another era and another place, you know, it's a...

Tavis: Is there a particular era that you'd like to be transported to, if could you play characters... Is there a particular time you really enjoy?

Badu: Maybe from the 20s to the 50s.

Tavis: Right.

Badu: That whole...

Tavis: What about that period do you find fascinating?

Badu: The look.

Tavis: The look.

Badu: The issues.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Badu: The music.

Tavis: Mm-hmm. Yeah. On this particular role, 'House of D,' for those who've not seen it and didn't see our conversation with David Duchovny, tell us about the character you play in this movie.

Badu: The character I play, her name is Lady. She is a woman in a tower, which is actually a house of detention in New York. It's based on a real, from what I understand, a real house of detention that was located in the East Village. Lady happens to see the main character Tommy, the teenage boy, burying some money in the ground. Every day the women scream out of the window at people that they see on the ground. So she happens to strike up a conversation with him, and they become friends. And she becomes one of his best friends, along with a retarded Greek janitor, Robin Williams, at the high school where he goes to-- at the junior high where he goes to. So I guess her main role was, I guess, to play an angel, just as Robin Williams. You never know where they will be or who they are. So it's a film about, I guess, prejudice in a way. Yeah.

Tavis: It's also a film about, as I interpreted it-- It is about that. But it's also a film, as I interpreted it, about people who have an impact on your life.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: That's why you mentioned those angels, people that really impact. I suspect there are people in your life who have impacted you significantly.

Badu: Sure. Sure.

Tavis: Let's talk about some of them. Your mama, I assume?

Badu: My mother. I have five mothers.

Tavis: Five of them. Let's walk through them.

Badu: Let's walk.

Tavis: Let's walk. You start. Number one.

Badu: My mother.

Tavis: Your maternal mother.

Badu: Colleen Queenie Wright. She was a young mother, had me at age 20, so she was still very much energetic and fun, and we slept with her and woke up with her and went to the park with her. She gave me the sense of humor that I have.

Tavis: I said maternal, I meant biological. That's your biological mother.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: All right, second one.

Badu: The second one is my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. Her name is Thelma Gibson. Thelma Lois Gibson. We called her Thelma Lois. She gave me my sense of dignity. 'Close your legs. Put that down. When you get in the store, you don't want nothing. Don't ask for nothing. Don't do that.' And 'Get off the phone, let that boy call you.' You know. Those kinds of things. The manners and the sense of dignity, pretty much, morality. My third one, come on.

Tavis: You got biological mother, maternal mother.

Badu: 'Cause I need your fingers.

Tavis: Biological mother, maternal grandmother. Number three?

Badu: Number three would be my paternal.

Tavis: Paternal grandmother.

Badu: That would be my father's mother. Her name is Viola Mattie Wilson. We call her Ganny.

Tavis: Ganny.

Badu: Ganny.

Tavis: I love black folk and the names we give our grandparents. Talk to me about Ganny.

Badu: Well, Ganny gave me my sense of religion or spirituality. Ganny was a tambourine-totin', Bible-shakin' grandmother who...

Tavis: Not the tambourine-totin'-- I used to love-- I used to tear that tambourine up in my Pentecostal church where I grew up.

Badu: Did you?

Tavis: I loved playin' tambourine.

Badu: I can't imagine that.

Tavis: Absolutely. Played every Sunday. And was choir director, too.

Badu: Do we have a tambourine on the set?

Tavis: No, there ain't no tambourine, 'cause I would wear that thing out if they had one.

Badu: I don't believe that.

Tavis: Next time I see you in concert, call me onstage. I'll work it out for you.

Badu: I don't believe you.

Tavis: I can work a tambourine out.

Badu: OK, I wanna see that.

Tavis: OK, I'll do that for you.

Badu: That is my favorite instrument.

Tavis: Tambourine is? I didn't know that. You played one, too, in church?

Badu: Not in church, but around the house.

Tavis: Around the house. Yeah, OK. So biological mother, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother--Ganny.

Badu: What Ganny gave me was a sense of spirituality. I remember she bought a piano, and I played my first song-- I wrote my first song at age 7. It went 'Baby, baby, there you are...' She came into room and said, 'What are you doing? You can't sing about that. You don't know about no baby, baby.' So she took me in the back room, so at the end of the day, the song was 'Jesus, Jesus...'

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: So she gave me that sense of, if you're gonna sing something, it needs to mean something. It has to be about something.

Tavis: I'm laughing about that, because to this day, you know, there are still folk who do that. I mean, gospel artists who would take a secular song and switch it in a minute and have a hit with it. All right, so that's paternal grandmother. Number four.

Badu: My godmother. Her name is Gwendolyn Hargrove. She's from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was my mother's best friend. I was christened in St. Paul United Methodist Church. She became my godmother. And every summer she would take me with her to the park where she worked at a recreation center. She was the director of one-act plays. She put me in my first play, gave me the sense of the stage and performing and don't turn your back to the audience. And this is what you do, and give me more. You can do it. My first role was a character called Alligator, in 'Really Rosie.' So I tore Alligator up. And my godmother was very much responsible for me understanding and appreciating theater, and I went on to become a theater major in college.

Tavis: Wow.

Badu: As a result.

Tavis: And last but not least.

Badu: Mother Nature. That's, um, that first boyfriend that broke your heart. That's, um, your period. That's the pains from different things that give you the sense of being alive, because before that, you kind of floating through space. But once you get the first pain in your heart, then Mother Nature gives you, you're pretty much alive and aware. It's kind of like taking the red pill. Yeah., coming out of the Matrix.

Tavis: I can't imagine, since you have been influenced by so many mothers, since you are a mother, you got these maternal instincts all through you. What do you like most about being a mother now?

Badu: Having the opportunity and responsibility to be the first person to mold a person's mind.

Tavis: It's an awesome responsibility, though, isn't it?

Badu: It's an awesome responsibility. It's a big one. And it's also a gift, because at the same time in the process, I have the opportunity to re-create my own mind, you know, and create more possibilities for myself. And not limit myself at all, as I grow a child.

Tavis: Let me ask a crazy question. This may be way too personal. If it is, slap me, and I'll back up off of it.

Badu: OK.

Tavis: As a mother, since you get a chance to create other possibilities--I'm not a parent yet. Are there things about your own children that you want to help shape and mold not just differently but better than what you...

Badu: Sure.

Tavis: ...have?

Badu: I think every parent does.

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: You know, every parent blames their parents in some kind of way for their failings, you know, as we all know. So I want to be a parent that can be ready for all of those things, and to understand my child as he and she grow.

Tavis: Talking to you is always fascinating. I could do it for hours. I can't let you go, though, without asking about the music. What you're working on, what's next on the music front?

Badu: I'm working on my album right now--new album. As you know, 'Worldwide Underground' was an EP, which was a buffer between albums, which was a writing in the process. So I gave the audience a chance to see my process.

Tavis: What you're working on.

Badu: Right. This is kinda what we're doing right now. I had to get those things out. The next album--I mean, I'm really excited about it. I'm giddy about it, I'm in love with it, you know. It's brand-new right now to me.

Tavis: Well, if you love it and it's like all the rest of your stuff, I'm sure we will love it as well. I love you, and I love your book, and I'm glad you came on.

Badu: Well before we go, let's go back for a minute. I remember, you had a whole show about "call Tyrone." What was that about?

Tavis: I had a show on "call Tyrone?"

Badu: Yeah, you did.

Tavis: Oh, back-- You know what? You really took me back. This was back on B.E.T. Years ago.

Badu: Exactly. I just turned on the TV, and you had a panel of experts.

Tavis: See?

Badu: I think it was Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson.

Tavis: You see the influence you have?

Badu: Bob Marley. Everybody was on the stage. Talking about--I was male-bashing. I think you were saying, 'Yeah, that's a shame.' Come on. Come on.

Tavis: No, I'm glad you raised this. I do not recall every aspect of that show. What I do recall was that song I think like most artists, if you write a really good song it kicks up a national conversation about the lyrics. And I was just trying to explore the fascination that people have with this song. And as you know all across talk radio, people are addressing this issue of what this song 'Tyrone' meant. So I was fascinated to have the conversation.

Badu: It was funny. It was funny. I just --

Tavis: All right. You try to read me on my own show. Erykah Badu trying to front me.

Badu: On your own show.

Tavis: On my own show. I'm glad to have you on.

Badu: I'm glad to be here.

Tavis: 'House of D' is the film starring one Erykah Badu. Go check it out. That is our show tonight. A reminder: Starting this weekend can you catch me back on public radio, on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching.

Badu: Before we go, I just want to say: Thank you. Very much.

Tavis: And keep the faith.

your job would not exist w/o me (against analysis)

2008-03-30T12:42:00.001-04:00

"talking back" and INKHEAD on the F train to Jay St. (a poem sorta)

"talking back" and INKHEAD on the F train to Jay St. (a poem sorta)

1.

maybe all the poems i have ever written are dedicated to anna julia cooper

2.

there are children in bed-stuy who need poetry

not the poems i write for them

but the poems they craft through

silences, out bursts or purple bubblegum

they speak place like this...

and they speak truth like this...

and they speak right like this...

their poems are slightly tilted and behind the beat

on purpose

they play a phonograph

only laminated floors and

windowless walls understand

huh?

what you mean?

their resistance is not slogans on placards

or ph.d’s or worksheets or

coloring inside the line

3.

they are not fond of translation

4.

and can smell bullshit creeping up from miles away

they got highly developed sensory capabilities

5.

"the path to conocimiento" to transforming consciousness-is neither linear nor easy"

6.

bell hooks writes about "talking back"

as INKHEAD tags himself over industrial bodies

and i manuver my way back to brooklyn for

poems and awakenings

my teachers rock the flyest sneakers/ with t-shirts to match

know who is really home

and who aint really ready yet

____________________

please note: quote from gloria anzaldua found in

anna julia cooper, visionary black feminist by vivian may

writing and listening ....always

2008-03-30T12:41:00.000-04:00

control f.r.e.a.q. ( somewhat a poem but maybe not)

control f.r.e.a.q.

for alice coltrance/ e. badu/ and q-tip

after TRACE on a Saturday Nite

(because all poems are found poems)

1.

this is your brain

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BADU

2.

"...transition with a real slow fade..."

3.

this is a jazz poem

because linear though just

like linear movement is boring

4.

this is a jazz poem because

assata speaks across the oceans to me

her glance and foot steps reminding

me to "embrace myself"

and "love my body"

6.

this poem is a jazz poem because jazz

is a recipe for spring time sex

before the skin is scented

summer sweat or stretched by a lovers moan

5.

jazz is a recipe

like this

2. limes

4 large chunnks of pineapple

4 small cubes of ginger

juiced

sipped against the sun

8.

this poem is a jazz poem

because jazz is funk’s mama

and hip hop’s grandmama

and is the illegitimate daughter of the blues

7.

this poem is a jazz poem

not a stump speech or a letter

or an essay or protest novel

or a semi-autobiographic creative non-fiction narrative

or an elegy or an abstract surrealist experimental formalist literary work

9.

damn....q-tipislookinggoodashellicantwaittohearhisnewshit

10.

i told yall

this is a jazz poem because

three nites ago the chill broke

like my first boyfirends gold chain

this is a jazz poem cause jazz is rebirth

like an orange moon squatting low over central park wanting lullabye

11.

"and if you think about turning back i got the shotgun for yo back"

12.

this is a jazz poem

cause "lawd knows i’m tryin"

and slipping

and sinning

and singing

and running

and resting

and running

again the record skips and i dip to find the right key

12.1

this poem is a jazz poem

because the head nod is an ancestral gesture of communal

affliation and no you ain’t supposed to get the beat

variations on the same riff

2008-03-27T02:15:00.001-04:00

you knew
when you placed that light inside me
when you licked this gold mine like you knew x marked the spot
when you stole my eyes
when you said rest here and waited three seasons
for peace to dwell in my pulse
when you measured my laughs in teaspoons of rain and breath
when you wrapped my hair in your skin
and carved an ankh on my lips
and softened the span of my hips
and charmed my neck roll
and said rest here and waited for the tides to subside in my step

you knew you knew
your face would be infinitely written on any future-brotha
your thumb print could never be washed from the inside of my left thigh
your scent would mingle in my every folicle
you knew
i would pass someone in a city you never visit and look twice and think its you
although you never visit

you knew
i would say hello hello twice like that
and wait for the sax in your voice to be revealed

hello hello

you knew how much i believe in god

and that even if i carved myself into some distant unthinkable corner of this earth
even if i went underground cause of some extraordinary revolutionary shit i got hooked up with

even if i forgot my own name cause my memory decided to swim away from me

i would never forget you

Nu Work on EryKah Badu

2008-03-17T11:56:00.003-04:00

video.vh1.com

Greetings family,

This week I have a large task. I will be writing about body, sex, humor and the poetics of awareness/space in the work of Erykah Badu.

My project is in no way comprehensive but seeks to articulate how she uses irony, hyperbole and humor in three musical performances/site over the span of her 11 year career.

The work looks at

Anne-not yet recorded on vinyl or pressed on CD but performed for the past few years

Booty-recorded on Mama’s Gun

and

Afro/ a freestyle skit

Here are some questions I am dealing with as I move forward

1. how do elements of humor such as hyperbole and irony articulate a poetics of awareness/space in e.badu’s music and performance?

2. how does badu perform such an articulation? gestures, choreography,"funk", voice, "southernity/southerness", "style", political invocation?

3. tracing the trajectory of her career, what are the marked shifts in her usage of humor especially as expressed in Anne, Booty, and Afro/ a freestyle skit? What do these sifts illustrate?

4. what is the role of e. badu’s sex/sexuality in her performance of humor? what is the role of humor in her performance of sex/sexuality?

5. what if anything is erykah badu saying about race/ womaness/ freedom/ space/ community/ blackness through her performance

6. how does e. badu incorporate blues/ funk/ and hip hop to articulate a poetics of space?

7. what is a poetics of space and how does a poetics of space help us think about humor in e. badu’s work? what kind of space am i talking about

creative space/ space as sexual autonomy "had two babies different dudes"/ space as artistic process (reference Garage Band, online street teams, buy your album straight from me campaign/ space as expanding or maturing intellect/ wisdom "this year i turn 36"/ space as expanding body-"my ass and legs have gotten thick"

so yes...i will be bombarding you with snippets of my project and random stuff about e. badu

i usually write poems to help facilitate my scholarly process, and all processes, so do please check those out as well.

here are some to get you started

Badu Haiku

1.
in the rasp of your voice
in the twang of your scat
we find liberation

2.
"cuz im cleva" i know neo soul aint so new
like shell toes like high tops like b-girls from the "dirty d"
you bend beats and stretch rhythms through millenia

3.
if a priestess is she who carves rituals in our spirits
who clears our path with snippets of sage
who conjures a hymn to save us all
then a priestess you be

See EryKah perfrom @

http://www.vh1.com/video/play.jhtml?id=1582333&vid=213224

cheese!

2008-03-15T00:46:00.001-04:00

sistas circle goes live!!! and you can be a part of it as well.

2008-03-13T11:02:00.002-04:00

The Questionnaire

You thought you were too far away to participate in a performance process going on in NYC, well you were wrong.Calling all sistas who got something to say about blackness, womanness and artistic process. For more information visit www.imanotaproject.wordpress.com.

Please answer the questions below in any form you choose: a poem, letter, story, list, sketch, dance, meal, outfit or what ever!

Then send it to me at furiousflower@gmail.com along with a bio and picture or yourself and what you created.

Please note if you want your ideas to be kept private, just let me know and I will honor your wishes

So here is the assignment:

As the Gumbo Yaya Sistre transition into thinking about our personal narratives of healing and spirituality, I would like to extend this process around awareness, identification, and literary production to all the sistas who come in contact with this email.

-please complete the questionnaire below

then,

choose one of the following prompts and engage with it in your own way-

-a letter written to yourself as an infant

-a letter written to yourself as an elder

-an interview between you and a sista younger or older than you.

Questionnaire-

Please answer the following prompts-

-what does it mean to be a black woman to you? do you identify yourself as a black woman?

-what is black women’s art? is this important to identify? should art be universal?

-what does it mean to be an artist to you? do you identify yourself as an artist?

-what does womanism mean to you? do you identify yourself as womanist?

-if you could ask your mother one question about her journey as a black woman or artist, womanist, or spiritualist, what would you ask her?

-if you could ask your daughter or future daughter about her journey as a black woman or artist, womanst, or spiritualist, what would you ask her?

-is there anything that gets in the way of your process as a black woman artist womanist spiritualist?

-is there anything that supports your process as a black woman artist womanist spiritualist?

-what does an artistic process look like to/for you? do you have an artistic process?

-what comprises a womanist artistic process? is there such a process? should we (we being black women cultural producers) be concerned with this process?

Life and Peace,
Ebony Golden
furiousflower@gmail.com

saartji listens to poison and ponders ~~~~~a poem

2007-12-30T14:20:00.000-05:00

saartji listens to poison and ponders

why exactly cant you trust a big butt and a smile

heat and curves do not kill

a jiggle you can feel in your throat/ is pleasure

and my lips bending into a poem is a smile not nuclear war

there was a world built here some call earth

or heaven or ocean or god

my butt and lips are not three card monty

are not watches sold on L's in the city mothered by oya

or the snap of a brothas spanish/ he wants to leave on your breast

the issue of trust does not lay here or here or here

beneath the pyramid of my pelvis

writing about writing~~~some reflections

2007-12-30T14:16:00.000-05:00

Reflections and ripples

As I write this, I am sitting at the same table I was sitting at when I first learned to divide. This is the table I had breakfast at after I began my first period. I introduced my first fiancé to my mother at this table. Not much has changed about this table but the people who sit around it are dramatically different. My mama, the spicy intellectual, who ran a tight ship and kept me off the streets and encouraged to do great things has mellowed out a lot. In her retirement, she takes long walks and likes her house to stay silent. I am writing right now about rhodessa jones' Medea Project for Incarcerated Women. I am writing about the "power and possibility," the title of Elizabeth Alexander's most recent collection of essays, of staged embodied narrative and the transformative implications of story telling and movement. There are indeed transformative qualities.

This kitchen table used to be surrounded by yellow walls. The refrigerator is the same so is the stove. The floor is different. Large beige ceramic tiles. I can't remember what is was before, but once a mouse got in and ran so quickly across the floor to get away from us we couldn't help but laugh. The walls are now a creamy white. Once I splashed red kool aide on these walls. They are much different now. So am I.

I am writing at this table now. Trying to finish this paper, that I want to read to my mama. She knows her baby is at NYU writing and reading all the time. Writing through graduate school. Writing about women writing and reclaiming their labor for their own well-being. I am writing about how women undo time. The trauma of the prison industrial complex ages us, whether we are locked up or not. I am writing about how this goddess called rhodessa rewinds the narratives, back through the rough parts, back through rocky roads women want to forget, back through the good parts too. She wants us to hold onto the good parts. The good parts reveal a different part of the self. One that does not need to be bandaged up by drugs, bad relationships, self-deprecating behaviors and actions.

I must admit I am possessed by the narratives women write about their time here on this planet. I think a part of my life's work is concerned with how we take back the time that really is all ours. How we make our bodies bend time to our specifications. I wonder what rhodessa is doing or undoing right now. I wonder what toni Morrison is doing right now? I wonder what audre and june are doing right now. I wonder what my mama is doing right now. Oh she is playing solitaire and looking at the stacks of books I brought home to write with.

I am looking for an origin that may not exist. I want to know where cycles begin. Is it behind the wind? I want to know how cycles can be interrupted, shaken, cracked open to reveal a new sunlight. I am looking for a way to interrupt my own harmful cycles. I am looking for a way to intrerrupt the cycles of women who look like me. African women, poor women, white women, spiritual women, Houston women, women in florida. Women everywhere, who share a similar skin. I am called to continue writing and performing an intervention that shines like this little light of ours.

working our rainbows~~~another essay on performance and activism

2007-12-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

UnDoing Time: The Medea Project for Incarcerated Women as Social Activism

Dedicated to Joan Little and Many other Sisters "Locked Up"

"…we have had to look from the outside

to make sense of a world that has not endeavored

to include us among its intellectuals."

-Elizabeth Alexander

"Let us not forget to remember that

the struggle continues for all of us."

-Rhodessa Jones

Come Into the Sun, a coalition dedicated to delinquency prevention, reports that between 1970 and 1990 the number of women offenders increased 896 percent from 588 to 5, 858 (Fraden 123). Additionally, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children reports that although black women comprise 7 percent of California's population they constitute 34.1 percent of the prison population, with Hispanic women following at 22.7 percent (124). In "Imagining Medea", Rena Fraden documents the nine-year journey of the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women. Fraden includes interviews, photographs and analysis of the successes and challenges the Medea Project encountered as the project gained momentum within the prison system.

Angela Y. Davis, Berkley scholar and noted prison industrial complex abolitionist, writes in the forward to "Imaging Medea", "One of the important contributions of the Medea Project has been to demystify the relationship between crime and punishment. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause of expanding prison populations has been widely contested" (xi). The statistics fail to present the social factors such as drug addiction, racism, domestic violence and poverty that heavily skew these numbers. In the following excerpt from "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women", Mama Pearl reveals why she began engaging in illegal behavior. "I got three daughters. My older daughter was born deaf and dumb. She's the reason I went to jail in the first place. You see, I embezzled some money from the company that I was working at so my daughter could get special training so that she could take care of herself, despite her handicap" (Elam 369). This monologue illustrates the choices some mothers are forced make to support their children. The staggering figures, along with Davis' thoughts and Mama Pearl's scenario, suggest the overarching sociopolitical issues affecting how and why women go to prison and speak to failed rehabilitation programs and high levels of recidivism within the California Department of Corrections.

Rhodessa Jones created the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women after the California Department of Corrections hired her to teach aerobics. The project incorporates physical theater, writing, dance, and healing modalities to "explore whether an arts-based approach [to rehabilitation] could help reduce the number of women returning to jail" (culturalodyssey.org/medea/). "The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman in the theater workshop, who was incarcerated for infanticide, was ostracized and taunted by other inmates. [I] told the women the story of Medea and Jason and asked the group to interpret it in relationship to their own lives, to consider ways in which they were like Medea, but also different," says Jones (Warner, 484). The Medea Project staged "Big Butt Girls, Hard-headed Women, Buried Fire, Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead, and Reality Is Just Outside the Window during her tenure at the San Francisco County Jail. Jones' project, subversive in creation and application, high-jacks the space of the prison industrial complex and provides a venue for women to actively engage in narratives around their incarcerations.

Beginning in 1987, Jones facilitated workshops on Wednesdays with the women. She began with twelve women who were assigned to her aerobics class. Soon, her enrollment ballooned to over fifty women once the word spread that there was a place women could heal and rehabilitate themselves through acting. The project provided time and space for the women to meditate, through the practice of performance, on the complex social factors involved in their individual journeys to jail. Jones, a trained actress, dancer, and choreographer, noticed immediately that the women desired a space to express what court systems, lovers, and family members refused to hear. Her process shows physical activity as an extension of language, and language as an extension of the body. Harry Elam notes,

"The correlation between "aerobics" and "Big Butt Girls" is not ironic nor trivial, but purposeful. Aerobics hones and shapes the body. The use and abuse of women's bodies is the center of Jones' performance piece as well. Jones reveals the pressures, constraints, degradations, and exploitations enacted on and against the bodies of these "Big Butt Girls" and "Hard-Headed Women" by their society, their lovers, their families, and even themselves" (10).

Elam's idea speaks to what Teresa Ralli teaches in her Voice of the Body workshop at Casa de Yuyachkani in Lima. In this workshop, Ralli leads participants through a series of yogic breaths and asanas, modern, improvisational and experimental dance movements to free the voice from certain blocked spaces in the body. Her workshop teaches participants about the intimate connection the body and the voice share and reveals a process of healing that happens when the voice is freed from the body. Ralli insists participants move like poetry, like water, free from silence's viscous restraints.

The inaugural production of the Medea Project, titled Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women "explores an underclass of women who are intentionally silenced and ostracized by the systems of power" (Elam 9). Ralli's workshop enlivens the chakras from the deep dark spaces of the root chakra to the bright spaces of the crown chakra to dislodge the voice locked inside the body. In one session, Ralli led participants through a series of vocal exercises. The call and response exercise included a series of whispers, chants, shouts, screams, and various other exclamations. During the session, several participants incorporated rhythmic hand drumming and stomping to express what the voice could not but the body could. At some point, each participant's body and voice were tuned, which tuned the voices and bodies for the entire group. Not only did each individual body and voice make music, but the entire community harmoniously connected and functioned as a cohesive entity. By exploring the sound of the spirit inside each body, each participant unravels an instinctual voice that allows the individual to listen, reinvent and revise the narratives that create the soundtrack to their personal triumphs and traumas.

The project serves as a site for exploring alternative rehabilitation modalities. Jones utilizes Brechtian and Boal methodology as well as critical ethnographic practices as espoused by Dwight Conquregood and D. Soyini Madison to engender personal narrative, thoughtful interaction, and shifts in consciousness that leave lasting impressions on those women who share these experiences. Fraden offers, "This is a case study that describes how the Medea Project creates and alternative, sometimes oppositional space, and how it reshapes theoretical and practical boundaries that mark off the aesthetic, commercial, political, moral, personal, and religious realms we inhabit at present, evaluating which methods work best at creating more permeable boundaries" (xv). Fraden's ideas speak to what she, Jones, and Davis express as the knowledge that much work has to be done to alter the lives of these women or the prison system. Her ideas illuminate the importance of teaching and rehearsing a practice that could work one woman at a time to create a massive restructuring of the prison industrial complex and possibly other institutions as well.

Jones' project uses one of the few resources afforded to women in prison. A resource even the prison can not arrest to critique women's imprisonment. Time is a major resource in prison. Sorrentina, one of the characters in "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" exposes what doing time does to the body as she undergoes a detoxification program in solitary confinement.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

The lord be with thee.

Blessed are the fruit of thy womb.

J e s u s.

Holy Mary, mother of God.

Pray for us sinners now,

And in the hour of our death.

I'm so damn tired. I'm tired of being sick and tired. She's fucking dogmeat, man. Just one little shot. This bitch, snitches at Work Furlough. She was getting stoned, too. Piss in a cup. Piss on your family, okay. Fuck you. Count time, my ass. When will this shit end? This is the longest nightmare I have ever had.

During a brief stint as a GED instructor in a male medium security prison I learned the value of time and how time is practiced. I watched men watch the clock, ask each other about what time it was, and ask each other about how much time they had. Some of the men talked about "filling" time with reading, or completing puzzles, or various nefarious activities, but time was always a topic of conversation. Perhaps, the men where attempting to "grasp" time, to "retain" some semblance of time and their power over it. They counted minutes to lunch time. They counted days to canteen visits. They counted weeks between visits and letters to hold onto their relationship with those on the outside. I learned about how time orients society and how this orientation impacts the prison as a microcosm of society. I learned that several of my students worried if they didn't see me walking across "the yard" at a certain time every morning. They thought up all kinds of scenarios from sicknesses, to car wrecks. A few even thought that I may have been searched and detained for drug smuggling one morning. The point is time in prison creates positionality to the others "locked up", to the self, and those on the outside. Relationships are heavily affected by time. Some of the men were broken by how much time they had and felt they could never do or perform all of their time. While others, with lighter sentences, moved as if they were on vacation at a resort. Those men most always earned their GED's, increased their technical skills and stayed out of trouble. They did time, instead of allowing time to do them. Wherever one is situated in society, time is a resource and a commodity that institutions within society want to benefit from. Money is made based on time and bodies. The men talked about choosing GED courses over the road squad because they refused to let the prison make money off their labor or time. They chose GED courses because they felt they would reap the benefits of education before the prison system and in that way they resisted the prisons construction of time and labor.

The Medea Project performs a similar resistance as practiced by the men a Warren Correctional in northern North Carolina. Fraden writes, "In other words, as women's presence behind the walls continues to grow, so does their performance of the invisible labor summoned by the expanding prison population as a whole" (xi). The Medea Project serves as a model and a practice for returning the fruits of incarcerated women's labor back to those women. So much focus is placed on what inmates will do after they are released from prison, but very little attention is placed on the road to prison. It is almost as if the prison system resets time at one's admittance. But time is multi-directional and the project unravels it. In essence, Jones instructs the women on how to steal time from the jails, how to bend time to their benefit instead of letting time defeat them. This project absolutely is about destabilizing time as a method of psychically, emotionally, and spiritually escaping prison. The Medea Project serves as a site for what Angela Davis calls "theorizing on the ground" about how best to equip women with the tools needed to create their own relationships with time (past tense, present, and future) and space while matriculating through the prison system and beyond.

It is also important to spend some time thinking about what cultural business radical theatre practice accomplishes in space of the prison. Specifically, how do these virtuosic bodies and voices, occupying multiple spaces and times, under Jones' direction and tutelage circumvent the prison space? Moreover, how do the women's voices and bodies along with stealing back time, also steal the prison's space. We can think about how the women steal their bodies back from society and the prison through performance. We should also think about how the women take up prison space with their voice and performance. A large part of the performance of the prison industrial complex continues the dehumanizing social practices women experience on the outside. This practice of alienation dismantles relationships women have with themselves and other women. The destruction of these relationships possibly prohibit women from recognizing how their individual struggles comprise a larger tapestry of experiences that effect the majority of incarcerated women.

Birthing these personal narratives begins to address the stigmatism associated with women offenders and the traumas the share. Through activating the voice of the body, the space of the body transforms but also the space of the prison changes as well. Jones believes "through love, through the power of the ancestors, through the linkage of past to present and future, a body can "catch a body". The needless loss of black lives to the prison system can be overcome through collective consciousness and the formation and assertion of community" (10). Jones identifies the development of a community as a foundational and fundamental step in her process with the women. Fraden includes photographs of correctional officers smiling as they observe the women's rehearsal process. She also describes one moment when she observed one of the women's inmate identification bracelets as the performed at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. Both of these incidents illustrate how the space of the prison was altered by the Medea Project. Unfortunately, the prison system is large enough to hold multiple narratives and the participants in the Medea Project maps another narrative onto the space of the prison.

Thiong'o's article, Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space, asks us to consider the politics of geography, "open space", "openness", "territorial space" along side issues of body, movement in postcolonial Kenya. I agree with Thiong'o's assertion that the tug-of-war occurring between the artist and the state is a power struggle in which both parties seek leverage over space and also seek to perform autonomy. Through examining the personal agency of bodies in space, or restrictions thereof, we examine the states colonial/postcolonial practices of domination, oppression, and censorship which seek to squelch community performances of resistance. Taking a cue from Thiong'o, I wonder how the Medea Project pushes the limits of the function of the prison space. Certainly, the prison is not a space for artistic training or the site of major
rehabilitation. However, we should consider the potential of the performance space that no longer serves as a site of prescribed action.

Jones reveals that "benign neglect and blind rage" make the women's problems
"too immense and too great". She says, "But I was raised in a family by a mother and a father who taught me that when you're called to something too great, too immense, you can always take it to God. Now the African in my American teaches me to take is to the Ancestors" (374). Here the Jones articulates a poetics of presence that challenges spatial frontiers. The preceding quote conceptualizes a framework, a set of tools that extends back and into the future, and is all-encompassing like faith and belief in the in the omnipresent strength and fortitude of a trans-national family. It may be helpful to read Thiong'o ideas about re-scripting space along side Jones' work. Both projects seek to replace the narrative of space created by the ruling power structure with that of the marginalized population. Their projects "fill in the gaps" as Suzan-Lori Parks describes in
an interview with Shelby Jiggetts in Callaloo Journal.

Elam notes, "She challenges audience members to recognize their personal connections to these women. "Who are these women? She's your mama. She's your lover. That women who is gonna carry your child." Jones points out that the system of crime and punishment touches all our lives and that we all have a responsibility to act for social change."(10) Jones' work urges us to reach past our comfortable or uncomfortable positions to recognize how we are all implicated in the phenomenon of the prison industrial complex. Jones writes, "In jail. A black woman artist, working in jail. I look out at all those faces. There's my mother's face, my sister's face, and my daughter's face. And I'm wondering how in the hell did they get here in the first place. And I realize that it is but for a flip of fate that it could be me in here and she out there" (367).

Fraden includes a monologue from Slouching Towards Armageddon that works to vaporize these boundaries. She writes, "A white prisoner, Angela Wilson (Confusion), delivers a piece that speaks about her frustration with landing in jail. Wilson describes her rage at finding herself in jail as a kind of second jail, her "own personal lockup." She recognizes, as the monologue progresses, that she is responsible for herself: A killer I've allowed myself to be—of me. Here, all locked up in this place. Heart, mind, body, and soul, all agree, we can't wait, to be set free, of this prejudice against—me." Wilson describes a prison not comprised of brick and mortar but prison as an experience or set of experiences, an embodied prison she "can't wait to be free of". This monologue highlights the psychic "lock up" women can experience on "the inside" or in society. In this sense, prison is an invisible state of being that affects and is affected by a series of personal and
social events. Again, Jones' turns the spotlight on the audience members and calls for everyone in the room to participate in the work of imagining their own prisons. In an odd and uncomfortable way, Jones builds a community in the safe space of the theatre that diffuses notions of identity and space through the performance of private narratives in public. Again she reiterates, we are all involved and implicated in the stark increase in women going to prison and living on "lock down".

This monologue alongside Jones' dramaturgical practice of conflating classical mythic texts and street language or aerobics and theatre therapy builds on a larger legacy of black women's cultural practices of healing around the kitchen table or on the front porch. Jones' project destabilizes the canon and allows diverse voices to express similar issues that take place in classical texts. In this respect, we maybe able to read Jones' work, in part, as a project against genre. Elizabeth Alexander talks about reading as a poet in her most recent collection of essays Power and Possibility.

I assume I have always "read as a poet," which is to say, there are various shapes of poetic argument in prose. Reading as an African-American woman intellectual poet? Reading, as my lodestar Audre Lorde would have it, with all of my selves active and present and vigilant and alive. The great utility
of so much black feminist theory was the guiding truism that black women have blazed alternative routes to making sense of the world, that regardless of our differing circumstances, we have had to look from the outside to make sense of a world that has not endeavored to include us among its intellectuals. Alexander reminds us how poetry, specifically black women's poetry, conceives alternate configurations for black women in this world. Alexander's ideas engender thoughts about the social and political work theatre must accomplish for black women. It must create new avenues, wide enough for black women to walk down. It must allow for our full citizenship in the world. It must be a space where we can explore the totality of our being. Her ideas in some ways, talk about poetry more as an interwoven series understandings and performances that are larger than genre.

Actually, her ideas refute genre as Suzan-Lori Parks performs in her anti-genre essay "New Black Math". A project that challenges the silence and the disease resulting from traumatic life styles and the trauma of the prison industrial complex cannot be bound by genre. It would be a re-manifestation of the restrictions placed on them by society and the prison system. Possibly, we could understand Jones' work as one to dismantle the prison industrial complex but also we would think about it as one that dismantles the prisons that stratify communities of women, that render us unrecognizable by our sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends locked up, locked down, or locked away. We are all co-participants in this madness called a world.

One performance of "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" is performed as a one-woman show in which Jones performs the poems, stories, and monologues written
with Regina Brown, Mama Pearl, Lena Sorrentina and Doris to reveal the porosity of identity. Jones transitions between the four characters and herself as the artist, diminishing the frontiers separating women by infusing one narrative into another. She embodies and performs the question that creates the working hypothesis of the Medea Project: Can a body catch a body? The choreographed falls and recoveries, swirls and facial manipulations show a merging of bodies and narratives that make each individual story a part of a larger healing narrative.

Sara L. Warner writes about her experiences observing the process in her essay "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". In one of the sessions she observed, the incarcerated women demanded to know more about Jones and the other facilitators. Warner writes, "I soon learned that what separated the women on the outside from the women on the inside was for the most part circumstantial. The volunteers' histories were similar, if not the same, as the women in orange: sexual abuse, foster care, drug addiction, domestic violence, and poverty (489). Jones requires that the participants are honest with themselves and with the group. In order for her to require this, she must also practice full disclosure. Her honesty shows the women that there are other choices for the same circumstances. In what is commonly referred to in southern black communities as a "come to Jesus" session, everyone reveals who they are and relationships can be built on equal solid footing by all the participants.

The violence of the prison industrial complex insists on the hierarchical construction of power and domination that systematically marginalize oppressed women. While Jones' project makes this crystal clear to Medea Project participants, she also makes them aware that the prisons are not only at fault. The project emphasizes the amount of women who are trapped by circumstance or limited opportunities for advancement. Jones makes it apparent that at any point in time anyone could be backed against the wall and may end up sitting right where the participants are sitting. In an NPR interview she talks about how art has made the difference between her and some of the women "locked up" in the San Francisco County Jail. Lesley Yalen and Cynthia Cohen make known in "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work" that, "Arts and culture are important means through which people and communities come to understand, express, and communicate their ideas, emotions, needs, hopes, concerns, and memories". I agree. Art elicits a process by which we can bring memories from the corners, from the forgotten spaces of the past to the present. But that process extends past the present, it must. Artistic and cultural practices also serve as tuning devices. Tuning individuals into themselves and their communities. Just as two drummers will eventually breath in unison, it is possible that a community that creates art together will eventually be tuned into each others needs and desires for social and civic movement.

Bibliography

Alexander, Elizabeth. Power & Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Cultural Oddyssey. http://www.culturalodyssey.org.

El Grupo Yuyachkani. http://www.yuyachkani.org.

Elam, Harry and Alexander, Robert, eds. Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. New York: Penguin Group, 1996.

Fraden, Rena. Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones & Theater for Incarcerated Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

National Public Radio. "Medea Project Brings Hope to Incarcerated Women". Oct. 2007. www.npr.org.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. "New Black Math". Theatre Journal 57:4. December 2005. pp. 578- 583.

Thiong'o, Ngugi. "Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space". TDR. Vol. 41, no. 3. Autumn, 1997. pp. 11-30. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Warner, Sara. "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". Feminist Studies, no. 2. Summer 2004

Yalen, Lesley and Cohen, Cynthia. "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work". Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work: Focus on Coexistence and the Arts. July 2007.

Ebony Awarded Grant for Current Project

2007-12-30T13:49:00.000-05:00

Peace family!!!

So most of yall know I am working on a ethnographic healing process with a group of women here in nyc and in nc. Well I have been awarded a small grant to continue this oh so important process.

I am very thankful to NYU for supporting this work in this way. Here is more information about the grant.

Sistas, you are still welcome to participate if you wish...

peace,

e

The -Ism Grant http://www.cmep.nyu.edu/ism.html

Racism. Capitalism. Individualism. Feminism. What is an "–ism?" They surround us. We live them. We embrace them. We resist them.

Accordingly, the –ISM Project, provides a venue for students to critically examine the complex ways –isms permeate their lives, especially in regards to diversity and in-tolerance. The objective of this program is to provide an opportunity for students to engage in an education and professional project, which encourages creativity, freedom of expression, and free thinking.

What is the –ISM Project?
This unique program encourages students to analyze various –isms in our communities as it relates to race, culture, class, gender, politics, religion, and other existing social constructs. Beyond critical analysis, the participants create artistic platforms to creatively express their research and personal understanding of their selected -isms. The resulting projects' shared goal is to incite introspection, open exchange of ideas, and social change in the NYU community and beyond.

Coming from all academic disciplines, past participants have focused on the "conventional," like Colonialism and Sexism, to the unique and personal, like Buckwheatism, Hip Hop Feminism, and Outofthebox-ism. No matter the subject, the participants' objective is to creatively explore and challenge their own ideologies while initiating meaningful discussion, which encourages diversity, understanding, and critical thinking. Students are encouraged to use a variety of media available to them, such as photos, paintings, audiotapes, videotapes, journals, or skits, to portray their –ISM project.

In the fall semester, students go through a competitive application process preparing and presenting their -ISM Project proposals. Receiving a grant commensurate with project expenses, selected students work throughout the spring semester researching their –isms and creating their original artistic pieces. During the creative process, the students have the option of collaborating with faculty and local community members. All participants share their work with the NYU community at CMEP's annual -ISM Gala.

performed violence--on black womens body

2007-12-11T20:03:00.000-05:00

Anarcha
The Mother of Gynecology

Anarcha was an African American slave woman. She was one of the seventy-five slaves who worked the Wescott plantation, just on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.

Anarcha went into labor one day. Three days later, she was still in labor. Dr Marion Sims was called in to assist the delivery. He writes in his autobiography that he used forceps on the fetus’s head but that he really didn’t know what he was doing since he’d had so little experience with the device. We don’t know whether the baby survived the ordeal. We do know that the mother experienced several vaginal tears from the birthing. She became incontinent afterwards due to the damage.

A few days later, the master of the plantation sent Anarcha to Dr Sims hoping he could repair the damage to his slave, as she could not hold her bowls or bladder. As her master’s chattel, her condition reduced her value considerably.

Sims took in the patient reluctantly. He put her up on his examination table, on her hands and knees and, using a modified pewter spoon to expand the walls of her vagina, he accidentally released the pressure that held her uterus in an awkward position. Anarcha felt immediate relief as the change in air pressure helped her uterus to relocate back into its proper position.

Through an agreement with her master, Anarcha became Dr Sims's guinea pig. She regularly underwent surgical experiments, while positioned on Sims’s table, squatting on all fours, and fully awake without the comfort of any anesthesia. It was commonly accepted that African Americans had a higher tolerance for pain than their white counterparts. Commonly accepted but utterly wrong.

Anarcha’s fistula (from her vaginal tears) was repaired by Sims. Sims thus became the leading expert in repairing this damage that seemed to occur in a good number of births by slave women. Though Sims was sent many slave women with fistulas, we know from his biography that he experimented repeatedly on Anarcha, as well as two other slaves, Betsy and Lucy.

Anarcha was experimented upon, and drugged up later, not to ease her pain as much as to stifle her moans. It has been calculated that she had been operated on, perhaps, 34 times. She, Betsy, Lucy, and countless others helped Dr Sims hone his techniques and create his gynecological tools. Though on display in museums, many of Dr Sims’s tools have modern counterparts that are used today.

Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy left no written legacy. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, a crime punishable by death.

And though science today looks back on Sims’s work ambiguously, truly unsure as to his level of success, or whether he should be credited as the father of gynecology, we now know who the mothers of modern gynecology were: they were the nameless and faceless slave women upon whom Dr Sims experimented.

Today we have just three names: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. It is our hope that these names will never be forgotten.

Pioneer in Performance Studies Transitions

2007-12-11T19:05:00.000-05:00

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 06 December 2007
BERKELEY – VèVè Amasasa Clark, an associate professor of African American studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, and a literary scholar who coined
the term "diaspora literacy," died Dec. 1 at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley
after being found at home in a coma. She was 62.

VèVè Amasasa Clark

During her 16 years on the African American studies faculty at UC Berkeley, Clark
became an expert on such topics as African oral expression and the Francophone
novel. She was instrumental in helping create at UC Berkeley the nation's first
doctorate program in African diaspora studies.
"Her theorization of 'diaspora literacy' has functioned as a model for numerous
scholars in the field, here in the United States and in the Caribbean. She will
be sadly missed," said Suzette Spencer, an assistant professor of African American
studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a former student of Clark's.

Clark's urbane manner was reinforced by her multilingualism. She spoke fluent
French, Spanish and Creole and had a fair understanding of Wolof, a language
spoken in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. She co-edited "The Legend of Maya Deren"
(1985), a biography of the avant-garde filmmaker and theorist; and "Kaiso! Katherine
Dunham: An Anthology of Writings" (1978), about the iconic dancer and choreographer
who died last year.
"She was the epitome of a brilliant scholar, passionate thinker, gifted writer
and master teacher," said Ula Taylor, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of African
American Studies. "As a colleague, she was a woman of integrity who was committed
to encouraging younger faculty to embrace their own intellectual voice."
As a mentor and champion for black scholarship, Clark worked on the retention
of African American students and sought to provide a support network for graduate
students in African American, African and Caribbean studies. What many students
loved most was how she challenged them academically and intellectually.
"She could think so far out of the box, it was mind-blowing," said Lisa Ze Winters,
an assistant professor of English and Africana studies at Wayne State University,
Detroit, and a former student of Clark's. "Even as she pushed you, told you that
your work could be better, you knew she really wanted you to succeed, to exceed
your own expectations. In her mind, there were no limits."
Clark was born Dec. 14, 1944, and grew up in the New York City borough of Queens.
She was the only child of Alonso Clark, who was from North Carolina and belonged
to the worldwide historic Freemasonry fraternity, and of her Caribbean mother.
VèVè Clark was extremely close to her father, friends said. Both her parents
are deceased.
As a child, Clark first contemplated becoming a doctor and then a musician, according
to an interview she did in 1996 when she became the inaugural recipient of UC
Berkeley's Social Sciences Distinguished Service Award.
As an undergraduate in Queens College at the City University of New York, Clark
majored in romance languages. After receiving her bachelor's degree in 1966,
she continued her language studies at the Université de Nancy in France, where
she received a certificate d'études supérieures. She returned to Queens College
and received her master's degree in French in 1969.
During the 1970s, Clark headed west to UC Berkeley, where she worked as a teaching
assistant in French and then as a lecturer in what was then called Afro-American
studies. She also taught French at an experimental collegiate seminar program
on campus that was known informally as Strawberry Creek College.
Daphne Muse, director of the Women's Leadership Institute at Mills College in
Oakland, met Clark in 1973, when they were both teaching at UC Berkeley. The
two quickly became close friends, and Clark officiated at Muse's wedding.
"She would have me on the floor in tears with laughter. She had an uncanny ability
to mimic, and she was just brilliant," said Muse. "She was also incredibly generous,
both spiritually and financially."
In 1980, Clark was hired as an assistant professor of African and Caribbean literature
at Tufts University in Massachusetts. During that time, she worked on her Ph.D.
thesis in French and ethnology for UC Berkeley and received her degree in 1983.

In 1985, she received a faculty research award from Tufts to attend the United
Nations Conference for Women in Nairobi. A year later, Clark was promoted at
Tufts to associate professor of African and Caribbean literature.
In 1991, she returned to UC Berkeley as an associate professor of African American
studies. That same year, Clark won recognition for coining the phrase "diaspora
literacy" in a paper titled "Developing Diaspora Literature and Marasa Consciousness."
She defined the term as the ability to understand multi-layered meanings of stories,
words and folk sayings in African diaspora communities through the knowledge
and lived experiences of the community members' cultures.
Her method of using literature to convey experiences inspired students to look
beyond dry surveys and interviews for their research. That was the case for Erin
Winkler, who took Clark's "Diasporic Dialogues" course during her first year
in graduate school at UC Berkeley.
"As a social scientist who researches children's developing understandings of
race, I was not sure how a literature course would speak to my work," said Winkler,
an assistant professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

But Clark encouraged Winkler to use coming-of-age novels in her research, said
Winkler, "because they speak to experiences of race in ways that sometimes go
unspoken in surveys or interviews. What she modeled in her own scholarship had
a profound impact on my development as an interdisciplinary scholar."
During Clark's career, she received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship
for research on choreographer Katherine Dunham and a graduate fellowship for
study at the Université de Dakar, Sénégal. She also was a Rockefeller Foundation
fellow-in-residence at Brown University,
In 1996, after winning UC Berkeley's first Social Sciences Distinguished Service
award for "service that benefits undergraduate and/or graduate students," Clark
explained to an interviewer her passion for fostering a new generation of black
scholars.
"We're all trained in something else: English, political science, French, sociology,"
she said of her own generation. "How many Ph.D.s do we have who actually came
though in African American studies or African diaspora studies? So, it's exciting
to me that we are about to develop a generation in this field."
Trica Danielle Keaton, an assistant professor of American studies and global
studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, fondly refers to Clark's
adages as "VèVèisms."
"'Joining the ancestors,' a precious VèVèism, is not an ending, but rather a
transition, something that feels akin to one of VèVè's 'zen moves' to higher
and safer ground," Keaton said. "I am humbled by the love that she bestowed on
us, her 'intellectual daughters and sons.' Indeed, I am honored to be but one
of so very many touched by her genius and generosity."
Clark is survived by a wide circle of friends, colleagues and students. A memorial
gathering in celebration of her life and legacy will be held on Friday, Dec.
14, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Lipman Room in UC Berkeley's Barrows Hall.

Asanas for Megan Williams

2007-12-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

i am trying to think about the intentional process of invisibility around the violence acted against Megan Williams. i am still trying to wrap my brain and my heart around this case and what our collective responses could be.

i am trying to think about how trauma stifles my ability to respond to acts of violence in my community and around the world. is it that my trauma stops me from acting when i see other black women traumatized? what do we do next? is it these historical traumas that some how shift my body back to a time when i could not say anything, or bear the same trauma my sista experienced, or worse? is choosing not to act against our historical or contemporary trauma a mechanism for keeping our safe, in some way?

i am trying to think about how i can take back my body from trauma. what does an embodied resistance look like? perhaps, it looks like a body, full of light, harnessing her strength, and refusing to be frozen by trauma. perhaps, it is a body who refuses to have her tongue tied by fear. maybe embodied resistance is a heart that refuses to stop beating, that refuses to have the love pressed out of it.

embodied resistance, could be black women free from heart disease, diabetes, womb disease, mental disease. embodied resistance could be black women freeing their bodies from food, cultural pressures, drugs, alcohol, social pressures... as i write this i am sure embodied resistance is all of these acts and more.

i am trying to think about how to process this trauma against our sista megan williams in an intimate, real, transformative way. i am looking to find a way for individuals to actively participate in a healing movement for Megan Williams no matter whereever they are. here is a call to action for anyone interested in sharing healing evergy with our sista. you don't have to march, protest, write a letter. you don't have to leave your dorm room, you warm living room, you can even do it on the train, at a stop light, on the bus.

i am asking for everyone who reads this post to dedicate one minute of yogic practice, meditation, or breath work to Megan Williams. if you are not a yoga person to do one or two stretches for her. if you are advanced do a head stand or full lotus position for her. take a moment or two out of your day to breath deeply, complete some fire breaths, or kemetic breaths for Megan Williams.

as you are doing this, think about her healing, send out some well wishes for her, her family and our collective healing.

our collective action will shift the energy around this case. we will not be immobilized by trauma.

our embodied resistance is movement is breath meditation is the quest for our collective health and well-being

here is a poem for encouragement

i am a daughter of ntozake
of june of audre of nikki
of sonia of gwendolyn of jayne
of asha of lucille of rhodessa of anna
of ruth of elizabeth of toi of marilyn
of nina of cassandra of ella of fannie
of rosa of nayo of bernice of anjail of aretha
of toni of sapphire of ai of betty of pearl of bertha
of of of of of ofoofffffof fofofff

our collective heat is a back bend that strenghthens our walk
our collective heat is a visualization that wraps us in warmth
our collective heat is a moon salutation that greets the night
our collective heat is slow and concentrated breath deep in the diaphragm
our collective heat is heat is heat supple and pulsing and balancing the universe

peace,
e
furiousflower@gmail.com

Creating a space for black women's voices - Campus News

2007-11-27T14:40:00.000-05:00

Creating a space for black women's voices - Campus News

Two graduate students recently created a club that lets black female students at NYU who are interested in dramatic performance network among women with similar interests.

Gallatin graduate student Geneva Thomas and Tisch graduate student Ebony Golden created the Black Women in Performance Studies Work Group, in which members can "explore black women performance methodology," said Golden.

This methodology, or technique, is a way of reflecting the "tradition we're coming from" on the stage, Thomas said. Mentioning the work of performers such as Ntozake Shange and Anna Deavere Smith, Thomas said this method of performance "centers the subject on black women, on our stories and our words, and it is heard in a black woman's voice."

Golden said the group is a solution to something that was missing in the Performance Studies curriculum at NYU.

"We noticed there's been a gap in experiential practice created by black women," she said. "So in our network, we can explore this in a way that is not controlled by people outside of black women."

Though based in New York and open to undergraduate and graduate NYU students and artists in the community, Thomas and Golden's group membership extends to the country's borders, from students at Duke University in North Carolina to the University of California campuses.

"There are black women doing this work all over the place," Golden said.

Thomas and Golden are currently planning a jazz concert in mid-December, along with a winter mixer to "exchange ideas," Thomas said.

"We're also planning a one-day symposium in spring, which will include a keynote speaker and panel discussion," she said.

The group is still being developed. Thomas and Golden are recruiting members and have recently created a Facebook page.

Tisch graduate student Ayanna Williams, who recently joined the group, thinks that all students at universities like NYU - especially those in minority groups - want to have their voices heard.

"It's not so much about separating ourselves as it is about being seen and feeling supported," she said.

"As of yet, there is not an organization like this on campus," Williams said. "We feel like we are filling a void by creating a support network, not only for us now but also for those students to follow."

Emma Davis is a staff writer. E-mail her at news@nyunews.com.

Working our Rainbows~~~ sistas doing big things in the world of performance

2007-11-27T14:14:00.000-05:00

This sista is a poet, revolutionary, spiritualist, savior. Thank you sista tomeika nichole (http://www.myspace.com/tostarica501) for introducing me to her work and her light!

Woman Warrior Heals with Words and Wisdom- here is just a little bit about Sista Adama out of Atlanta, GA. Take a look at her website www.adamaspeaks.com and listen to her web radio show on wrfg.org.

After graduation from University of Florida with a B.A. in Psychology,
Presidential Awards, Scholastic, Leadership, and Organizational Awards and Honors, I returned to my birthplace, Atlanta, where I became a student
of Conscious Cosmic Citizenship and The Yunavasity of Cosmic Wisdom.
I began performing in 1984 with SOLAR at the New Orleans World Fair and as a solo performer in 1985 using the stage to minister to the hearts, minds, and souls of audiences through Creative Expressions of love, light, wisdom, and truth, in the media of rhythm, movement, verse, and sound.
Performances include appearances with the Staple Singers band in Piedmont Park, Black Family Reunion; with Positive Images Enterprises as model of Afrikan attire and spoken word at the World Congress Center, Atlanta Civic Center with Melba Moore, with Queens Historical Society as Queen Cadaka (Candace) in Queens of The Nile Now, Fox Theater, Egyptian Ballroom, Civic Center, Georgia Tech, Emory University, Georgia State University, Sisters Chapel,Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, Morehouse College, Variety Playhouse, 7 Stages, Kingfest,KMLK Jr. Center for Social Change, Afrikan World Festival Detroit, MI, Sisterfire Festival with Aisha Khalil of Sweet Honey & The Rock,Washington D.C, New York, NY for Lenora Fulani, Presidential Candidate, National Black Arts Festival 1988,94,96 Renaissance Hotel with Phyllis Stickney, Chicago IL. International Brotherhood Conferenc, KAND,and radio performances and interviews with WDET Detroit, and WRFG Atlanta, in addition to numerous other community ceremonies, events, and activities.
I've worked as consultant for Wholistic Stress Control Institute, Inc. providing Life skills, Art of Being, and Poetry classes for imprisoned youth through Lorenzo Benn Youth Development Center, Metro Youth Detention Center, Dunbar Community Center, and over 2,000 Atlanta youth through the Department of Parks and Recreation in 1999. I also taught life skills to 4-12 year olds with Gate City Heritage Preparatory Day School, Horizons Private School, and in the Atlanta Public Schools. I worked as President and co-owner of Mother Earth's Adornments, Inc. committed to the adornment of the whole being, body, heart, mind, soul and more!¨
We maintained a retail outlet in Little 5 Points for 5 years housing both the "Beadery" specializing in custom adornments, creative consultation, repairs, and beads and findings from the world over and the "Eatery" specializing in strictly vegan cuisine, nutritional, dietary, and spiritual consultation, I produce and host a radio program with 89.3FM WRFG Atlanta called "The Meeting of The Inner Circle", providing inspirational, motivational, dealing with issues particularly, but not exclusively, pertinent to African Americans.
The program is formatted to introduce the music and works of local and national artists, musicians, healers, poets, authors, activists, as well as open phone lines to facilitate greater conscientiousness and communication with the listening audience.
I am an Inspirational Lifestyle Change and Wholistic Wellness Consultant providing spiritual, nutritional and dietary support to facilitate cleansing, healing, and regeneration of the body, heart, mind, and soul.

Adama

Click here to go to her site

678-760-9299

2007-11-26T15:47:00.001-05:00

Greetings all,

Please check out an article on the Black Women in Performance Studies Work Group tomorrow in Washington Square News. Just click the link- http://www.nyunews.com/. Also if you have not joined the facebook page, please do so.

And please attend events by BWPSWG members...

JAZZ WITH A BLUE THREAD

Ayanna Williams featuring the Waterbabies and Ebony Golden (sharing poetic vibes)
Wenesday December 12th @ Ripple Bar
769 Washington Brooklyn
8pm, 2 sets

Look out next semester for...

The BWPSWG Winter Mixer and...

The BWPSWG First Annual One-Day Symposium
Featuring Works-in-Progress, Workshops and Panel Discussions

Take care,

Ebony Golden

I'm not really interested in the kind of drama that appeals to folks who attend the Negro cotillions or high society balls. I'm here to present community art as state of the art. I'm talking about using art as a tool of transformation; to provide a space for people whose voices haven't been heard. Understand what I'm saying? - Rhodessa Jones

visit www.goldendharma.blogspot.com

2007-11-24T21:20:00.000-05:00

Calling Black Women for Ethnographic Performance Process

Calling Black Women for Ethnographic Performance Process

Greetings people,

It is that time. I have been in a bit of hibernation while I was cooking up a way to get you involved with a so fresh and so necessary improvisational, sista-circle, healing, performance opportunity.

I am Ebony Golden currently living in Manhattan and attending NYU. I call a few places home, most recently Durham, NC. While living in Durham I had the opportunity to study with and make trouble with some of the flyest sistas around. We made art with the people and shared it with the people. We healed ourselves everyday!

I would not be here at NYU right now if it wasn't for them. I am dedicating this process and this year at NYU to them: Mama Nia, Mama Asantewa, Mama Nayo, Mama Nana, Mama Jaki, Mama-Dr. Ahmad, Mama Pearl, Mama Dimples, Mama Theresa, Sista Kim Arrington, Sista Zachari, Sista Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sista Jurina, Sista Alisha Gaines, Sista Serena, Sista Kriti, Sista Kai, Sista Shirlette, Sista Emily, Sista Kriti, Sista Kia/Mercedes, Sista Liz, Sista Amaris, Sista Namira, Sista Raina, Sista DeLana, Sista Nikki, Sista Alfreda, Sista Vikki, Sista Michelle, Sista Afyia, Sista Zelda, Sista Dannette, Sista Inga, Sista SimaFlower, Sista Paulette, Sista Manju

This process is in your honor along with my sistas from DC, TX, and in other spaces. You hold me up, thank you.

I am currently facilitating a performance project for Black women as a part of my Master's Thesis in Performance Studies based on black women's processes of healing from trauma, particularly historical and generational trauma. So how are your healing practices different from your mother's? How are they similar?

I am dedicated to my healing, the healing of the women in my family and extended family, and the world. This is a process we are creating everywhere, let's continue to tap in together and see what shifts.

This process that will have a few opportunities for performance, live and virtual, but mostly i am interested in articulating a poetics of womanist performance process and methodology that can be reproduced by us every where to heal ourselves and this world.

NEED
I need you to tell our story. A small group of sistas who are not afraid to undertake this work with me, whether they understand exactly where it is headed or not. Sistas who enjoy movement, music, writing, photography, people, good food, performing, making a fuss about us (black women), and who are not afraid to say we (black women) matter anywhere in this world.

NEEDS
1. 5-6 sistas to perform several times next semester
2. videographer/ photographer/ editor
3. choreographer
4. producer
5. stage manager
6. 'zine designer
7. web designer

NEEDS
1. voice recorders, tapes
2. gift cards (Target would be excellent)
3. performance space
4. video recorders, tapes, dvd
5. money, frequent flyer miles, train tickets, gas cards!!!

NEEDS

Your stories. Some of you are far away from me right now. But I would love to interview you about you and your healing process. Let's set up some time for phone interviews. I will be in TEXAS in December and NC in January so we can get together.

Every one is invited to NYC in May 08 to see a pivotal step in this journey. Can't wait.

oh and check out some of these sites to get an idea of what sistas are doing to inspire me: http://www.thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com/, http://talitharise.blogspot.com/, http://bettertospeak.blogspot.com/, www.goldendharma.blogspot.com, http://atthekitchentable.blogspot.com/, http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/, http://sweating-it.blogspot.com/,

Email me if you are interested!
Ebony Golden, MFA
Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, Director
furiousflower@gmail.com

seeking womb/ performing self and still working our rainbows

2007-10-30T18:52:00.000-04:00

ok family,

i am really beginning to enjoy finding out what black women are doing in and through performance. i must say i have been a bit pissed off about "going back to school" and writing a statement of purpose that says here i am a black woman who wants to study black women and the institution saying wonderful, and now that i am here, they act like i am speaking a different language, like i didn't say what i know i said.

but anyways. i am literally in hot pursuit of us (black women)cause i ain't really interested in what anybody else got to say right now. i have had a lifetime of all of that, it is time for some balance. so here is the most recent supa fly sista revolutionary artist i can across, i just hate that i am just meeting her. but here she is any way, in the flesh..

i'm just saying though...we so fresh!

found at www.culturalodyssey.org

RHODESSA JONES is Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco acclaimed performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, singer, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Founder and Director of the award winning "Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women" which is a performance workshop that is designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women. Ms. Jones just returned from leading a workshop at La Mama International Symposium for Directors in Spoleto, Italy. In the spring of 2004 Ms. Jones was honored with an Honorary Doctorate Degree from California College of the Arts. During the winter semester Rhodessa was Visiting Artist in Residence at Stanford University /Institute for Diversity in the Arts. In February 2004 Rhodessa performed the role of "Ruby" in August Wilson's King Hedley II at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater.

In November 2003 she was presented with a “GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement Award" presented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In May 2003 Ms. Jones was awarded a Non-Profit Arts Excellence Award by the San Francisco Business Arts Council. In June 2002 Ms. Jones received an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater.

Throughout the Spring and Fall of 2002 she toured her most recent solo performance, Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers. Some of the highlights of the tour included Anchorage, Alaska at Out North Contemporary Art House, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Shimberg Theater, and Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT. While in residence at Yale, Ms. Jones led workshops and conducted Master Classes for the MFA students. She also lectured at the African American Cultural Center at Yale University and was honored with a Master's Tea hosted by Faculty of the Yale School of Drama.

A series of lectures offered by Ms. Jones, has helped her forge a place as a major social scientist of our time. Among these lectures are the following titles, Creative Survival, Creative Performance, Theater for the Twenty-First Century, and Women Saving Their Own Lives. Most recently in October 2002, Rhodessa provided the keynote speech at the Cabrillo College Women's Studies Conference and the Center Force Summit 2002 Conference, "Inside-Out: Fostering Healthy Outcomes for the Incarcerated and Their Families".

Her most recent directing credits include Sekou Sundiata's "Blessing The Boats", Will Power's "The Gathering" and Deborah Edward's "From Whores to Matriarchs". Ms. Jones is currently a featured artist contributing to Building the Code: Understanding Community Based Arts in America, a research and publication project sponsored by the National Performance Network.

In January 2002, Ms. Jones starred in Regina Taylor's Urban Zulu Mambo at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco.

In the Fall of 2001, The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women's six month residency at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, produced its eighth work, "Can We get There By Candlelight?", an original work based on the ancient Sumerian Myth of Inanna. In November 2001, Ms. Jones performed her award winning solo "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" at Fordham University's School of Divinity. At Fordham, she also participated in a panel, "Activism and Spiritualism in the 21st Century". In December of 2001, Rhodessa and two ex-offenders from The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, were in residence at Rutgers University's Center for the Critical Analysis. The residency included a lecture by Ms. Jones, a performance workshop, a performance perusing the works of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, and a scholar's discourse on art as social change.

In the Winter of 2001, Ms. Jones was featured in Eve Ensler's award hit play, "The Vagina Monologues", produced by Theater on the Square. Following, in June 2001, her film collaboration "We Just Telling Stories" won "Best Documentary" at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. The film profiles Ms. Jones and her work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women in the San Francisco County jails. This award parallels the recent release of a book on Ms. Jones' work entitled, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and the Theater for Incarcerated Women. This book was released in December 2001 by author Rena Fraden, Ph.D. with a forward by Professor Angela Davis.

In July 2000, Ms. Jones was a featured teacher at LaMama Umbria, an international theater-training workshop in Italy, hosted by LaMama ETC of New York. In May 2000, she directed the nationally acclaimed world premiere of Erin Cressida Wilson's Trail of Her Inner Thigh for Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In the same year, Ms. Jones was honored as Working Woman of the Year by the Working Women's Theater Festival. She premiered her new show Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers at this festival. "Hot Flashes" is one of Ms. Jones' most recent works in her long legacy as an innovative performance artist. She creates autobiographical and provocative material that integrates inter-disciplinary performance and that utilizes film, comedy, theater and movement.

Born in Florida to a migrant laborer family, Rhodessa Jones is a proud grandmother of her daughter's girl child Chaz.

Jill Scott

2007-10-25T21:23:00.001-04:00

oh jilly from philly

The following was presented at the Neither Model nor Muse Symposium at Duke University a few weeks ago. The panel was Women Engage Hip Hop and featured Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mark Anthony Neale, and Rachel Ramist. Take a look at the video post after you read this, it is indeed relevant.

I Speak Your Name

Queen Latifah, Jean Grae, Roxanne Shante, Mystic, Madusa, Bahamadia, Sha-Rock, Mecca, MC Lyte, Lauren Hill, Erykah Badu, Salt, Peppa, Juana Burns, Dania Birks, Michelle Franklin (JJ Fad), Deidra “Spindarella” Roper, Cheryl “Salt” Wray, Sandra “Pepa” Denton, Da Brat, Mia X, Lady of Rage, Yo-Yo, The Ghetto Twins, Foxy Brown,
Lil Kim, Missy Elliot, Left Eye, T-Boz, Chilli, Godessa, Cuba, Chi, Sistamatic, Trina, Smirk, Kasumba, D-Unik, Kato, Jill Scott

Unearthing the Up-rock: Space, Body, and the Black Woman’s Voice in Hip Hop

I recently viewed Counting Headz at the Black Lily festival. Counting Headz is a film about politics surrounding women emcees in South Africa. I left the film energized, enriched, and enlivened by their ability to articulate the modes by which black women are evolving this cultural practice while refusing to deny their womaness. I was excited about experiencing these sistas in stero, on the big screen, rhyming, breaking, tagging, visibly with a degree of hyper-visibility in a space that truly belonged to them. With the audience’s gaze fixated on them. I was excited about voices filled the space. How their voices their beats reverberated around the room. The voices as multi-dimensional expressive dimensions that took up space. That had not been flattened out to breasts, and asses, and hollow/one-sided images or performances of male-manufactured black womaness.

Hortense Spillers speaks about space in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe specifically when she talks about being trapped in “oceanic time and space”. Spillers is talking about how the body, during the Middle Passage, was literally moving through time, as in chronologically, and space, as in from the west coast of Africa to the Americas, but being bound and restricted from physical movement. In a lot of ways I see the suppression of black women’s voices as a similar means of looking at how hip hop is moving, how black women are moving on the margins of hip hop culture in a space of restriction.

In the span of time it took to watch the film, I felt like black women had not only been freed from the bound-movement Spillers talks about, but also that we had travelled maybe just a little further toward society where black women’s voices would be could be allowed to resound freely.

Jill Scott’s Hate on Me helps me to further think about the black female body in relationship to the marginalization of the black female hip hop expressive culture. “Jilly from Philly” deserves time and space in this conversation because of 1. her stature as being a thick sista, and dynamic voice which oscillates between spoken word, funk, rock, “what eva it be” literally taking up space and 2. because of her how her career has been framed at times by the co-signing of black men: DJ Jazzy Jeff, The Roots, and even recently Cornell West and Tavis Smiley in the video for “Hate on Me”. So her expressive movement being bordered by black male co-signers. Most of us who are familiar with Scott’s work know that a majority of it explores her relationships to or with men. What they do to her, what she does to them, pleasure, lust, desire and so forth. But there is a larger meta-narrative happening in the positioning of men in her work that we should think about.

The lyrics to “Hate on Me” reveal the manner in which hegemonic structures remind black women that we are not enough. No matter how we bend nature to the whims of society we will never be enough. No matter how black women over extended ourselves how we have positively influenced every aspect of this world, we still are not enough and these super-woman performances do not seem to change the large degree of “hateration” inflicted on black women.

The marginalization of black women in hip hop is away in which we can think about a larger narrative of the hegemonic control of public and reproductive space, women’s space, artistic space, imaginative space that has a long standing tradition in this country.

So black women hip-hop artists are doing an immense about of cultural work in asserting their expressiveness. They are challenging the heteronormative and phallocentric space which privileges what Paula Giddings refers to as the Cult of True Womanhood which relegates women to the private sphere, which relegates women’s expressiveness/productiveness/performances to that of domesticity.

What we are talking about here is the female presence as voice, as body, as an articulation of self-actualization outside the control and sphere of male dominated and narrated spaces. So black women hip-hop artists are shifting the narrative, the narrated space, the script of experience, turning it on its head. This is about a reclaiming of voice, a reclaiming of space, and a change in the landscape of folk expressive culture.

Counting Headz Promo

2007-10-25T21:11:00.001-04:00

working my rainbows~~~performance and the spiritual liberation movement

2007-10-23T14:00:00.000-04:00

The Spiritual Liberation Movement: a Model for Creative Resistance and Cultural Awareness

"Spirituality is the language of the next milenium. Ignorance was the language of the last two milenia."
-Carlos Santana.

Yalen & Cohen, "Coexistence and the Arts" (article posted at www.mysapce.com/mamashieroglyphics on my blog)
www.stonecircles.org

This semester has encouraged me to think critically about the role of spirituality in social justice work. Partially, because spiritual activism is one of my research interests but also because we are thinking a lot about the body, land, agency, and desire all of which are apart of a spiritual practice as I see it. As I continue to think about performance and activism, I am called back to North Carolina and the phenomenal social justice workers I am work with.

One organization Stone Circles (http://www.stonecircles.org/) is accomplishing phenomenal deeds using a model called Spiritual Liberation. If anyone is interested in seeing a short documentary, let me know. At the risk of sounding reductive I want to share a little about this movement as it relates to Yalen and Cohen's article.

Yalen and Cohen write, "Arts-and-culture-based peacebuilding practices simultaneously engage people’s bodies, emotions, and spirits, as well as their intellects, whereas more conventional practices such as dialogue and negotiation rely solely on people’s rational capacities." I think it is important to spend time processing how spirit(uality) is activated and practiced through artistic and cultural practices.

In Spiritual Activism and Liberation Spirituality Claudia Horwitz and Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey detail the major tenets of Spiritual Liberation (http://www.stonecircles.org/thoughts/writing/liberation.html). They explain that Spiritual Liberation is concerned with:
* a deep commitment to spiritual life and practice
* a framework of applied liberation
* an orientation towards movement-building and
* a desire for fundamental change in the world based on equity and justice.

These ideas are both applied to individual liberation and collective liberation as well. What is so brilliant about this model is that each of the tenets described above is explored and implemented artistically and in community. I have been thinking a lot about how art moves, transcends, and builds something new as Anna Deavere Smith encourages in her book Letters to a Young Artist. That is precisely the question. How does art create something new? Moreover, how does spirituality facilitate an artistic process that transports individuals and communities out of trauma to a new and different space? Is this possible? Is it practical? Is it fair to expect those most oppressed by state violence to be able to pull themselves out of trauma? How does reliving that trauma through performance do any of that work?

Yalen and Cohen reveal that, "Arts and culture are important means through which people and communities come to understand, express, and communicate their ideas, emotions, needs, hopes, concerns, and memories". I agree. Art elicits a process by which we can bring memories from the corners, from the forgotten spaces of the past to the hear and now. But that process extends past the present, it must. Artistic and cultural practices also serve as tuning devices. Tuning individuals into themselves and their communities. Just as two drummers will eventually breath in unison, it is possible that a community that creates art together will eventually be tuned into each others needs and desires for social and civic movement.

Yalen and Cohen write, "In the aftermath of violence, to be convincing,
communication and learning must reach people’s bodies and
spirits, as well as their minds". Diana has kept "embodied practice" in play almost every class meeting. I believe she wants us to consider how the body is situated in the traumatic events. What is the body feeling? How is the "entire" body responding to various events. So the body is not just an intellectual being but also a spiritual being as well. The the practices of the body, in response to trauma or otherwise, should be both intellectual as well as spiritual.

Nina Simone: Four Women

2007-10-17T21:43:00.001-04:00

Greetings lovely people,

It is oh so important for us to remember. remembering is an "embodied practice" as explained by Diana Taylor almost everyweek in our Performance and activism class. As I continue to think about how this is specific to black women I can not stop thinking about mama nina. she got something to say about both embodied practices and remembering. we must remember. our legacy as black women and not let it get washed away in a sea of everybody's stuff. cause we got a particular stuff that we need to pay close attention to. As you watch this piece, think about how mama nina "works" as Teish describes in her book Jambalya. please pay attention to her speaking in tongues and dance. what can the body say that words can not, that piano can not. how does nina's dress, the grain of her voice, and her omnipresent stare inform her performance. how is nina's performance an act of conjuring or what black women do every day-make a way out of no way? do share your thoughts.

love,
e

more workings by Prof. Dickerson

2007-10-17T21:22:00.001-04:00

THE PROJECT FOR TRANSFORMING THRU PERFORMING:
re/placing Black womanly images

THE PROJECT FOR TRANSFORMING THRU PERFORMING proposes to enter the black woman’s performing voice into the scholarly discussion surrounding gendered identity as metaphor for all women and oppressed peoples, using “witness” texts. These witness texts are based on the words of real women and serve as places of memory; memory as it relates to the Greek martyr, which connotes witness. “Kitchen Prayers” dramatizes the national and international narratives of real women collected by THE PROJECT. By using the kitchen as the central metaphor for this work, we achieve several ends. First we (re)create a space in which women are made central. Second, we shift scholarly attention to the experiences, music, literature, public and private conversations and everyday behaviors of “ordinary”, easily forgotten Black women. These become the key sources (the witness texts) for exploring the meanings that women assign to mundane as well as extraordinary events in their lives. Finally, in discussions held after the dramatic presentation, we place scholarly commentary next to the witness texts and the narratives of our audience. We use these narratives to challenge and support each other. The work of THE PROJECT emerges then as a living manifestation of a deliberately multidisciplinary, ever evolving Black feminist scholarship.

Since the events of 9/11, the world has changed and so it is appropriate that the focus of THE PROJECT adjust to our new reality. When the world dialogue ratchets up to talk of war and retribution it is overwhelmingly a male dialogue. Men are considered the experts, the keepers of knowledge. In keeping with our mission to make central the ordinary woman’s voice, we want to add that voice to this predominantly male dialogue. By revolving this year’s “Kitchen Prayers” presentations around the words of women living under the realities of war, famine and oppression, THE PROJECT FOR TRANSFORMING will try to capture, reflect and understand the impact of 9/11 and other acts of global terrorism on women and their children around the world.

black women in performance~~~working their rainbows

2007-10-17T21:05:00.000-04:00

Peace family,

I found out about this dynamic elder sista doing performance work. You should check her out if you get a chance.

She was featured in this online magazine called Fathom http://www.fathom.com/feature/122665/index.html#

Transforming Through Performing: Oral History, African-American Women's Voices and the Power of Theater
From: University of Michigan | By: Glenda Dickerson

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | [ Glenda Dickerson ]What role does theater play in the larger discourses of politics, gender, race and history? In this interview, writer/director Glenda Dickerson (right), director of the Center for World Performance Studies at the University of Michigan, discusses the power of performance to transform the way we see, understand, think and respond. In Kitchen Prayers, her evolving series of dramatic performances, Dickerson privileges the actual words of women, accumulated from contemporaneous newspapers, magazines, broadcast media and other sources from across the world. This performance dialogue--acted by an entirely African-American female cast--weaves together strands of myth, song, painful reality and uplifting realizations. The result is a unique theatrical experience that draws its power from oral history and gives voice to those who would otherwise remain silent.

Fathom: How do you envision the social responsibility of theater?

Glenda Dickerson: I stopped directing, for the most part, traditional plays a long time ago. I got interested back in the early 1980s in making drama from oral history. I did a project called Eel Catching in Setauket, and it was built on the African-American community in Setauket, Long Island. They had been there since before the American Revolution, an early-nineteenth-century free black settlement. The people at Stony Brook, where I was teaching, did not know anything about this group of people, so I became interested in documenting the community and I made a piece from that. Ever since then, working with oral history had a resonance for me. I saw how it transformed people when they could sit and witness the dignity of their own lives, how transformatory that was for them and for other people in the audience. For me, this began to be the most important work that I could do: to try to capture a different reality than traditional drama.

I think the arts are important and I think the arts have a place; they have a task to perform in bringing about social justice or commenting upon society. Particularly since September 11, a lot of artists have responded very quickly. Usually art takes time to cogitate, to ruminate and reflect, and then it begins to speak on the issue. But I think September 11 brought about a number of immediate responses from the arts community. So I think the arts do play a part always in transforming society, and I think since September 11, the whole way we think about making art has changed.

Fathom: Kitchen Prayers appears to be a tapestry of different types of dramatic elements: spirituals, Greek drama and myth, oral history. How do you weave together strands from history and classical drama to respond to current events?

Dickerson: "Transforming thru Performing, Re/placing Black Womanly Images"--this is the larger project out of which Kitchen Prayers emanates--is premised on a couple of ideas. One is that we want to add the performer's voice to the scholarly discourse surrounding identity because the question of identity and the intersection of race, class and gender has traditionally been a scholarly discussion. The voice of the artist and the performer, if included at all, is typically brought in as punctuation for stodgy academic proceedings: academics read scholarly papers, and then the artist performs. You do not see the artist sitting down at the table and speaking as an equal. That was one of the thoughts that I had: something magical could happen if you included the performer--not the performing voice, but the performer's voice--speaking as a scholar.

The other idea I had is that the ordinary woman, whose life is a dissertation, has a lesson to teach us in this scholarly discourse on identity because that woman knows who she is. She does not need academic books to tell her who she is or to validate her life.

Fathom: Implicit in the title Kitchen Prayers is a reference to spirituality. How does spirituality inform your work?

Dickerson: I worked with a wonderful Chinese scholar in performance studies named Haiping Yan. She asked a mutual friend, "Does Glenda believe in God?" Haiping had been raised by radical communists as part of the revolution in China, and while she admires and is moved by Kitchen Prayers, it was confusing to her because I call the actors "saints" and "prayerful performers." That is very important because I do not want this work to be facile or perfunctory, and I do not want the actors to be approaching a traditional dramatic character where they might construct a background, discover the conflict, and identify the obstacles. We do all of these things to develop the characters, of course, but that is not enough. With this work, I am asking these women to stand in with honor and respect for the real woman. Sometimes that real woman can witness the act and she can say, "Amen," if it is acceptable.

That is the spiritual part of it, and it is not a Christian spirituality even though we sing, for example, "We are Soldiers in the Army." We sing those old songs, but we sing them out of tradition, not dogma. We sing them to acknowledge the shoulders we stand on. It is about the honor and respect we pay our ancestors.

Fathom: How do you assemble the voices that you are honoring?

Dickerson: This year, since we were doing Kitchen Prayers as a response to September 11, it took a little different turn.

Ordinarily, I go here and there and I record narratives. My colleague Jacqueline Mattis and I started working on a project called "Speaking Exile." We went to Tanzania to interview women from other countries such as Rwanda who have come to Tanzania seeking safe harbor. We wanted to talk to them about how they define home and how they passed on their culture to their children when they are not living at home. That was going to be the Kitchen Prayers for this year.

I had collected these narratives and then was going to transcribe them, look at them to see what themes emerge, and make the drama. But then September 11 happened and so we put this on hold. On September 11, I could not locate my daughter in New York until two o'clock. That was just so horrible. After talking about this, a colleague asked me to consider whether there was a way to extend that moment when I could not find my daughter to other women and their children and talk about a sense of global loss?

This idea intrigued me, and so that is how this Kitchen Prayers was born. To find new narratives, we read the papers and listened to NPR and went on the Internet. I started looking for stories of women and their children living under war, famine, all kinds of terror, and we accumulated many tales: that became one section. Another section was called "Patriotism, The Splendid Experiment." The actors and I talked together about what it means to be patriotic in this time: that became part of the play. Aeschylus became part of the play, as did the story of Niobe. Many years ago, I did a production of The Trojan Women and I set it in Africa. I felt, even back then, that the language of oppression is the same the world over. This is a Greek tale, but it is also an African tale, and it becomes the story of slavery. They are always real, those old Greek myths; they contain all of the elements of modern day suffering and anguish. You can always find one that speaks to the moment.

Fathom: You collect different women's voices from different cultures, and perform them by an entirely African-American female cast. What does the black woman's performing voice bring to your project?

Dickerson: We enter the black woman's voice as a metaphor for all women and for all oppressed people. We do this for a couple of reasons. We do this because we believe that the universal is found in the particular, but it is usually the white particular that stands for universality. So we are saying, quite controversially, that the black woman's particular experience is particular enough to be as universal as, say, Death of a Salesman. We say that because, in the American place, there is no American history without black history. It does not exist. You have to have black to define white. America has to have an oppressed person, a caste or class to define itself against, better than or liberator of. We are saying, No. We define ourselves and we define America for you through ourselves. It is a controversial stance that I take deliberately.

Fathom: How would you characterize your inclusion of female voices in the typically male-dominated dialogue of war and politics that emerged out of September 11?

Dickerson: When we are talking about war and retribution in this world, on this planet, it is always a male dialogue. When you look at CNN, ABC, NBC, you primarily find men talking, arguing, pontificating. It is their story.

In this context, the woman's voice is not deemed valuable and is not present, and therefore, a large part of the story gets left untold. In Kitchen Prayers, I try not to worry myself with how many bombs did they drop? How many caves did they look in? Will they ever find Bin Laden? I want to tell this other side of the story, the side of the story that cannot be told because the woman's voice is left out. And that story is not only the story of suffering and oppression. That is a large part of the story, because while we are focusing on these caves trying to locate Bin Laden, women are being raped and killed in Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone. Women are starving themselves to death in Turkey. All these other stories that are happening just do not come to the surface.

Some have reported that in Pakistan the rape of women has become so common that it has another name: it's called "lying down"--implying that you just lie down and take it. Another quotation is, "Rape is so common; it is more common than the bite of a mosquito." Those are the stories that I have to tell no matter what. I want to tell those stories, but I also want to include the voice of women who are working and fighting against these kinds of oppression, because you never hear about them either. This is happening all over the world.

Fathom: Where did you find your own voice as an actress and a writer?

Dickerson: I wrote actually about my coming to voice in an essay called "Wearing Red: How a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say NO." It is about a production of an idea I directed based on the poetry of Alexis DeVeaux. This was in the 1980s in New York. We made this play and we produced it ourselves. I had been making my living as a professional director, but often you wait for the phone to ring, for somebody to call and offer you a job, then you go do it. You get your paycheck and you go home.

But these women at the One World Café in New York, in the Village, they were so independent. They said, we can go look for a theater and just do it ourselves. This notion of directing and producing something ourselves, that was life transforming for me. And in the process of working on this show and producing it ourselves, that was my coming to voice.

This experience taught me that you can do it yourself, but it also taught me that you can say it yourself because I was never satisfied. I started out making plays even as a young woman teaching at Howard University. I was always making things. I was adapting The Trojan Women to an African setting. When I was making plays, I was happiest. When I went to New York, I realized I could make it myself, say it myself, and do it myself. It really changed my life. It was not too long after that when I directed a play on Broadway, only the second African-American woman to do so.

After this, I also realized that I do not need to do this. I went back to teaching. Ever since then, I have been moving toward where I am now: making plays from real people's lives, interacting with scholars--reading what they write and thinking about what they think. I finally feel like I can answer the question, Does Glenda believe in God? I can answer it with many pages of talk. It is definitely not a Yes, but it is definitely not a No. Everything in between: that is what my life has come to.

Relevant link

Center for World Performance Studies
(www.umich.edu/~iinet/cwps/)

anna deavere smith

2007-10-13T23:27:00.000-04:00

2007-10-04T10:27:00.001-04:00

U, Black Maybe (a choreopoem)

U, Black Maybe: Another Look at Global Positioning, and the Hopes of a Radical Overthrow

Suggested Readings and Viewings

Raul Zurita: Interview teleconference via skype (this maybe archived on www.hemispericinstitute.com)

Diamela Eltit: E. Luminata

Common Sense: Finding Forever (especially the trak U, Black Maybe)

George Schuyler: Black No More

Cheryl I. Harris: Critical Race Theory, The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, (especially the article by Harris titled "Whiteness and Property"

Josephine Baker: Princess Tam Tam (the film)

Jill Scott: The Real Thing (especially How It Make You Feel)

Amiri Baraka: In Town

Agosto Boal: Games for Actors and Non-Actor (play the construction of power game)

Nelly Ricard: Margins and Institutions

1 out of 40. this must be a project. "but we are all academics, we are all intellectuals". I must be clear like water, like purified air. I am stuck in a nightmare. You have a tongue that speaks for the universe? ask her and she will speak her own skin. "well in my analysis, in my opinion, in my estimation". Remove your language from my body, it is not your domain, it is not your space, your territory to ejaculate on/in, leave fulfilled, and spent.

This must be film where the end is improvised is acted out real time is scriptless. "only history will finish this action". but this, I can not burn away without casting myself in effigy. This bruise here to the cheek, or the strips of loose forearm flesh does not reveal an absence in this world. This world expects a silence my silence my death is their welcomed peace. then they will use my blood as tobasco and celebrate their good deed of ridding this world of all the blackness that insistent stench resilient stench they fight against.

This must be a project. Somebody is dissertating me at this moment. "oh well you know why her butt is so big, her thighs so wide, her hair so knotty"? the wheels in the cage go round and round. This must be an experiment to see when and how I will break down, break away, break out, break lose, break free.

Someone is monitoring my stillness and marveling. Someone is monitoring my smile and marveling. Someone is tracing my steps through the machine. "this is unbelievable. has she lost all will to fight?" "we have won, let's retreat, let's vacate".

Little darkie Josephine sitting in the corner

Little darkie Josephine sitting on the stoop

Little darkie Josephine sitting in the corner

Little darkie Josephine don't know what to do.

Is what they want to wash away blackness like dandruff from their scalps? This must be an experiment to see how far I can bend over bend back loosen like elastic before I….

What I am talking about is real simple. What I am saying is a theory of blood and bone and legacy. This is not an existential dilemma. Ask the women swirling in my head. Ask the women I call mama sista. This is not for play-play. What I am talking about here is a heaviness at the base of neck and real hollowness in my throat where my words get trapped. There is nowhere to hide away from this shit. There is no way not to be a warrior. Is there?

I'm talking about the constant slap across the face. And this world's urge (in our bodies) towards whiteness. Just go on and be white. Just go on and be white? The price, my death. The price, my bones. The price, my tomorrow. Fuck you.

Am I the metaphor? I must be, and this here must be some sort of quack-science poemetical experiment.

How many pills

How many pills

How many pills

How many pills

How many pills

I gotta swallow to go numb

No but really do these __________ really expect my silence forever? They must be doing market research so see how long they got to fuck wit me before I flip this thing. They must think they got time. They say,

Look how fragile

And the hair almost don't need no lye

And the tone the questioning inflection always is almost there

And look they so disoriented they don't know where home is

And see they don't even want to talk about that place or that story they made up

This must be a dream. But my limbs are numb. And street washing is on heavy rotation in my rapid eye movement. There is no sleep really. Just a stillness like running on a tread mill. Just a …

They can't think we ain't got nothing to say. They can't think we all wanna be like them.

What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness? What is the cost of blackness?

"Can't come around
They gon' wanna bring you down
No one knows just what's inside
Doing dope and doing time
Why they messing with your mind
Black maybe..."

2007-10-02T13:17:00.000-04:00

Through Blood, Across the Scream:

Constructing a Body (Meta)Narrative Under Dictatorship

Suggested Readings and Viewings

E. Luminata by Diamela Eltit

Margins and Institutions by Nelly Richard

Repasos Curated by the Hemispheric Institute at NYU: http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/cuaderno/repasos/index.html

If you are interested in either the book or the articles I read let me know. I am willing to share and or email what I can.

Peace,

Ebony (loving her own skin) Golden

A poem for diamela eltit's wounds

Look closely as the blood lets

As the rips sing a truth

A trauma a voyage

Look closely as the body becomes mist

Escapes it skin entertains dry veins

Look (first the arms like white angels)

At me (like a fleshy mary)

Then (like a dam unleashed)

A river of blood running home

Barefoot

What do you see the torture of this life

The noose stitched by my own hands more

What do you see my crow eyes squawking

Scratching a hymn into corporeal tapestry

Through Blood, Across the Scream:

Constructing a Body (Meta)Narrative Under Dictatorship

How can embodied meta-narratives critique artistic space in the aftermath dictatorship? What are the signs, symbols, inscriptions, markings, glyphs that transmit this genre-less space of violence and terror, trauma? How can the body pull itself from the margins to the center to redefine and recreate language under and outside of an oppressive regime? What are the practices? What are the actions? Where are the breaks, rips, fissures, ruptures, eruptions, gaps? What can the body reveal that an alien language can not? What can the body atone that the voice can not? How can the body reveal what language reaches for, but is cut from, a language that is high-jacked by the state for the purposes of (re)institutionalizing the body? What are the poetics of disillusion, disorientation? How is the body phonemic, phonetic, and whole language without words?

The idea of the "real" resounds throughout "Margins and Institutions". It seems that a dialectical tension exists between the body and language which conflates and complicates notions of the "real" as explored by Nell Richards. Davila and Foss offer that in the wake of the coup, language is left in a state of "intelligibility" which inspires artists to circumvent and rewire language in order "to seek alternative ways to recover the meaning of that history which had been replaced by the Grand History of the Victors". But where does this recovery begin?

I pose, alongside Richards, that language as an embodied practice, is an action that first must be articulated in the body. In the experiences of the body. In the "reality" of the body. Early in "Ellipsis and Metaphor" Richards shares, "The political and administrative control of expression through restriction imposed on language and its socio-cultural structures, was simply an expedient by which the regime could keep the production of meaning under surveillance". Which is to say that language, and I maintain a language that articulates a political platform or ideology of the oppressed or marginalized, serves as a marker by which the government oversees a particular group's movements and ideas. Clearly, in an oppressive society, language catalogs the discontent of the masses, and possibly serves as a vehicle by which the masses galvanize power to overthrow the state.

But language in the hands of the oppressor grafts a violent text on the bodies of Chilean people forced into silence by the state. Interestingly, Richards explicates the violence of language in the sphere of the art scene as a means of highlighting the academic appropriation born out of a quasi-multi-cultural aesthetic which displaces the political and social relevance of historically and culturally specific art. However, just as language is originally conjured in the body, we must consider the revolutionary implications of an artistic critique that is conjured by the artist who creates it. As artists create their works, we should consider the critical ideologies that are integral to their production. The language which describes, which analyzes this process should begin in the textured nuances that extend past the body during the artistic process.

Perhaps, we can speak about this process of body and creation in terms of birth. The creative process could be seen as the nine-month period from conception to birth, and the new-born serves as the referent, the metaphor if you will. Richards describes metaphor as a tool of deception. She writes, "Metaphor is one such privileged device, which prolongs the communicative process thanks to zones of opacity it sets up in the recognition of references; it increases the buoyancy of meaning so that it remains erratic and thus eludes the restricted reading imposed on it by censorship". While this quote unsettles my aforementioned birth metaphor, it reveals how metaphor muddies the spaces of cognition for those engaging with an artistic project, as spectators. So what the body knows and chooses to act out could totally destabilize popular notions of the "real" or "reality". Incorporating metaphor into artistic practice, I imagine, is like casting in intricate network of connective tissue out to multiple layers of society simultaneously.

But these ideas of the project, the critique, and the metaphor speak again to the referent, the thing we as spectators see and judge, analyze, attempt to make sense of. But this is a different language, different from the language that is glyphed onto the body like a burn, a scar. What language is produced when the body is both the creator and the referent for artistic projects?

The body is away of historicizing artistic projects. The body is elemental, it is the organic stuff, the background story; as well as the workshop, the gallery, the exhibit. The body reaches across temporal-spatial frontiers to speak an experience unique to its corporal existence. The markings, the scars, the burns, tell the individual traumatic narratives that words ache to find. Perhaps, each person needs her own language, because universal language may not actualize one's own project, it is utterly useless.

So I am left with thinking about how the body constructs a meta-narrative, a radical discourse, which reaches past itself into society's fibrous spaces to reverberate revolutionary ideologies, both individual and communal. What are performances of a "body rhetoric" doing as practiced by Eltit or Leppe? I am interested in thinking about how this self-inflicted trauma reintroduces violence back into the society. I am also interested in thinking about how these visual narratives become etched into the psyches of spectators. We should consider the short and long term effects, the social implications. It is important to consider how sacrifice, scarification, burning as a means of constructing a narrative impact the community. I am also interested in thinking about the role of pain in rewiring language. What can a scream or a slice do that a stanza or a manifesto can not?

Litany for Survival

2007-09-08T19:38:00.001-04:00

Amiri Baraka's

2007-09-08T18:31:00.001-04:00

2007-09-07T04:08:00.000-04:00

working my rainbows (essays about performance studies)

CARRIE MAE WEEMS Untitled Outtake from The Kitchen Table Series 1990
silver gelatin print
edition of 5
28 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches

So sistas and brothas, you may have figured out now that one of the major tenets of peformance studies is that performance happens everywhere and is not just confined to theater spaces. Cars perform, organs (kidney, liver and such) perform, nature performs, technology performs, so on and so forth. Objects perform, art pieces perform, etc. Above you find a photo created by the brilliant Carrie Mae Weems. Anna Deveare Smith calls Weems a visionary. I am amazed (but not really) by how Weems captures time, emotion, tension, and narrative in this photograph. This photo moves, like cinema, like water, like relationships.

How is this photo performing? What is it doing? What motion is created in stillness? Is stillness a figment of our imagination? Can emotion stand quiet motionless? Should it? Where is the breath in this photo? How do the bodies house the breath? Release it?

The bodies in this photo perform: guilt, disappointment, blackness, womaness, shame, fear, confusion...I have always been drawn to hands how the hands flail in delight, protect from too bright sunlight, welcome a lover, feed, birth, create, cleanse, break apart. here the girl's hands communicate feelings of fear, regret, timidness. The mother's hands communicate authority, power, strength, tiredness.

The bible in all of its complicated and layered symbology could possibly stand in for father/husband figure seemingly absent in the picture. what does the presence of the bible say about black men, black community when objects take the place of people?

we could talk about light, the grain/texture of the photo, the shadow behind the little girl, how the scene resembles an interrogation room, why weems chose black in white instead of color, how the eyes speak or mute narrative, the fact that the glass of possibly liquor, possible cola (who knows) is the closest item to the audience/spectator and what that means to the overall composition of the work.

Interestingly, I want to take a moment to share a poem not about any of those ideas directly (or maybe in tandem with) the kitchen table.

1.

here, my knotty hair becomes a slick black street

2.

here, i learn this little light of mine here,

3.

two times two becomes four for the first time for me

4.

here, i want to lean over and taste the sun of yellow walls here,

5.

i am taught how to stir gravy with an arm akimbo, a cock-eyed knee, and an ear holding somebody's gossip

6.

here, was the first time i "made" my books with aunt shellie

7.

here

8.

here

9.

here, we sing a poem through greasy fingers and sideways grins

10.

here,

i learn about strawberries and how not to be called a ho

11.

here,

we celebrate my first period with play-coffee and cheese grits

12.

here,

i say i'm grown everywhere else but here

2007-08-31T04:23:00.000-04:00

fluid and focused~~~a poem about welcomed blood

cycling around the full moon- august 28, 2007

there is a tickle behind flesh and vein

there is a twinge deep in the rounded darkness

there is a swoosh of beginning and the welcomed release

there is indeed a release

there is a trickle a gush a remaining spirit

a pinch an opening and cool ice cream from chisled infinite fingers

and warm palms on the back of knees and an extra kiss when he expects a cramp

there are many extra kisses

there is a warm bath a scalp cooled by florida water

and coconut oil all over everything

2007-08-31T03:59:00.000-04:00

From: Creative Writing @ A&T

Re: The North Carolina A&T State University Lyceum Series Presents

Date: August 30, 2007

For more information contact: Dr. Anjail Rashida Ahmad, Director, Creative Writing @ A&T Telephone: (336) 334-7771, ext. 2370; Email:arahmad@ncat.edu

For Immediate Release:
The North Carolina A&T State University Lyceum Series and the Creative Writing Program in English Presents:

"Sankofa: Secure Your Future~Culturally Engage Your Past."

Featuring: Righteous AIM Spoken Word Performance Troupe

Amaris Howard – Out of Hampton – Aggie Grad ‘04
Poet/Freedom Fighter/Activist

D. Noble Out of G’boro, formerly of The Collective
Poet/Essayist/Activist

Ebony Golden – Out of New York by way of Durham & Houston and DC
Poet/Dancer/Choreographer

3 of America’s hottest, most committed, award winning spoken word poets working on college campuses today. They’ve been featured on Def Jam, Nubian News, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide…and have toured in DC, Atlanta, Houston & Phoenix.

Their mission is Dedicated to uplifting and empowering individuals and communities through creative expression, social change, and the divine spirit through the arts.

Wednesday, September 19, 7:00 pm, NC A&T Harrison Auditorium ()Corner of Nocho & Bluford Streets. Doors open at 6:30 pm

(Also performing: The Donfolie Dancers & NC A&T Spoken Word Troupe: Poetic Insurgents)

Righteous AIM will conduct several interdisciplinary workshops Tuesday, September 18) with A&T faculty and students. These will be interactive experiences in which participants will explore different examples of self-expression as illustrated by certain genres of the black literary canon. For instance, Claude Brown’s Man Child and the Promise Land and Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X will be discussed as precursors of the hip-hop movement and other contemporary modules for exploring ideas of Black womanhood and the Black male sensibility as expressed toward Black women.

working my rainbows (performance studies essay)

2007-08-29T12:15:00.000-04:00

Unpacking the Crawl or Another Look at Global Positioning

By maneuvering through Manhattan in a kinesthetic position of lowness, Pope.L poignantly engages with ideas of mobility, space, agency, and identity which grow out of repeated experiences of state violence. In doing so, Pope.L’s crawls provide a lens through which viewers experience a performance of lack which contextualizes and complicates the ontological dilemma of black masculinity. His crawls ask viewers to intimately engage with the muck and the mess flung as everyday trauma against the bodies of black men. In a way, this performance of lack demands that participants revel in lowness, or at least imagine such a position, as if a ton of bricks were strapped to her back.

But what does Pope.L want to stir and agitate in the bodies of the co-participants who view and perform his project on lowness and lack? As Pope.L crawls and crawls one can not refrain from thinking about how long his crawls will persist before the subjugated body revolts against the prescribed position in society. Why doesn’t Pope.L finally just stand up as an assertion of visibility, verticality, and mobility? Why isn’t there a point of self-actualization in this performance piece when Pope.L creatively re-imagines the future positioning of the black male body on the rough and uneven terrain he crawls over?

These questions are concerned with action and agency denied to black men. Literally the curb-high view the crawl inhibits what the crawler can see ahead of him. Maybe Pope.L wants us to consider the dismal possibilities for the future of black men who can not see a block down the street, in this prostrate position. It is possible he wants us to think about how this quasi-blindness is inextricably linked to black men’s possibility for future self-efficacy. In essence, Pope.L wants us to imagine the historical and current context of embodied immobility that black men experienced in the past as well as here and now.

Lepecki tells us, “Pope.L tackles the question of presence by positing as its condition of possibility the stumble of being and not being never fully belonging to itself,” (93). Pope.L’s crawls are a choreopolitcal statement aimed at activating the community in hopes to unearth collective responses to this physical and societal problem. He reminds his audience of the important role the community performs in shifting the paradigm that makes the position of lowness a daily reality for black men. Did any of the crawl participants reach down to offer Pope.L help off the ground? Did anyone on the street speak up or speak out or help the brother off the ground?

One could assume that this crawl is symbolic of the subjugated positions of other oppressed people in society. Moreover, the crawls remind us of the tendency towards numbness and immobility in the face of repeated trauma. Pope.L’s crawls provide the visual by which communities can remember or experience the space of lack; however, he does not ask us what we are going to do to change this reality. One could only hope that by experiencing this global positioning participants and performers creatively work to dismantle the infrastructure that makes this dance possible.

working my rainbows

2007-08-29T12:07:00.000-04:00

working my rainbows (another performance studies essay)

I am still entering this field, the following meditation is another essay that represents my introduction to performance studies.

peace,

e

Fire Breath: asha bandale's

the subtle art of breathing

As a "performative" Healing Text

for Dr. Betty A. Sims & her daughter

one day

one day

i'm gonna be more than a survivor

i'm gonna be a celebrant inside myself

a party girl in my own soul

i'll take myself out to fancy restaurants

bring me roses

and afterwards

i'll make love to myself

and in the heat of passion

call out my own name

asha asha

-from asha bandale's

the subtle art of breathing

asha bandele's poem, the subtle art of breathing, examines the intersecting performances of violence and healing as experienced by Africana women. The poem unfolds around a single, archetypal, persona who questions her healing journey in the face of sexual assault, domestic violence, and substance abuse. Written as free verse, asha bandale utilizes a healing poetics Audre Lorde conjures in Need: a Chorale for Black Women's Voices, to offer a stereoscopic exploration of breath and poetry as "performative" healing for Africana women.

~~~

Sunday mornings find me prostrate, on my back, with a lavender-scented pillow blanketing my eyes. As remnants of myrrh incense tickle my nose, my yoga instructor urges me to lengthen the space between inhales and exhales. She invites me to consider what healing manifests through deep, conscious breathing. I hear her, almost distant, as if under water saying, "imagine your Kundalini life-force warming your whole body, now breathe."

~~~

Readers enter asha's poem as the speaker indulges in daily soap operas, which she heavily criticizes because of her "politically conscious" appearance. Nevertheless, the speaker's soap opera addiction symbolizes the exploration of the characters "staged" experience with violence and the space and time needed to deconstruct such experiences. The character's relationship with soap operas represents her attempt, not unlike the women in my family, to find respite while solving the problems of "…the fictionalized chaos/ of somebody else's life…" asha writes,

"but this is not a poem about soap operas

it's just that i cannot find another way to begin--"

To begin what, the troubleshooting process of solving the really real chaos this character experiences? The process of turning the gaze inward to mine, with mindfulness, tools like breath, as creative and personal ways to jump-start the spirit and move the body towards healing? It is possible the character cannot find a way to envision her life without the physiological effects of contemporary and historical violence(s). What is more, the character might not realize, in the face of consistent trauma, the metaphysical and physical rewards of actualized healing through breath; the subtle art addresses a myriad of possibilities.

~~~

Where does breath hide in the face of violence? My yoga instructor teaches that we choose to hold in our muscles, tissues, and joints stories of our individual and collective trauma. She instructs us to use breath and asana to release traumatic and violent episodes from our connective tissues. She does not encourage us to ignore these body narratives but instead to recognize their significance in our past and their relevance to our futures.

~~~

As such, the persona asha evokes in the subtle art assesses how instances with, "the various sundry crises/ in [her] life" enliven and enrich subsequent experiences with pain and healing. asha explores this struggle in the following lines,

"there are people who have

accused me of refusing joy

and blanketing the sun

but then there are people who

know as i know

even as we laugh

we cannot ignore

the wincing in our eyes…"

The aforementioned lines illumine the difficult journey the speaker, along with Africana women, travels in pursuit of healing from historical and contemporary violence. The speaker asserts notion that violence/trauma and joy cannot live in the same venue. This excerpt also addresses a broader audience who may believe the speaker is behaving in a manner that supports "victimhood" and she is solely responsible for correcting her "wincing" experiences.

~~~

One Sunday I practiced Kemetic breath in addition to my regular yoga asana. Kemetic breath insists the body create new patterns of storing and releasing air. I covered one nostril at a time, inhaled and exhaled, taking care to alternate nostrils. At first, the practice caused dizziness, and disorientation, but soon I welcomed this new and creative approach to "down-loading" energy from the universe. In the poem, asha presences her bond, all be it through instances of violence and healing, with the speaker.

~~~

She continues,

"…I know this space of mourning

is not mine to occupy

but i cannot leave

since your life reads like

the details of my life

which is why i must know

how come you are dead

but i am alive

yet we both were young black female

and fighting histories of drugs

violence separation loss…"

These lines invite the speaker and the audience to consider themselves as more than repositories for violence and trauma. asha reminds her audience that in the wake of trauma and subsequent internalized violence due to the intersection of race, class, gender and the patriarchal structures that support such culture, they are more than a collage of "violent marriages, newports, and suicide attempts." These lines move the persona and the audience to recontextualize instances of violence and encourage the persona, as well as the audience, to re-imagine life as a kaleidoscopic journey that entails boundless and beautiful interactions with the "self" and moreover, support consistent engagement with breath and healing.

the subtle art of breathing's theme centers around diverse approaches to healing. In the first fives pages of text, images and metaphors belabor and resist breath, which signify one aspect of actualizing the healing process, the state of anxiety, confusion or apprehension about how to transition from the place of victim to the place of victor. For example,

"…in anchorage today

a 30 year old black woman

was found in her apartment

dead of an overdose.."

and

"…there is no space to be second best

or needy

in a country trying to swallow up the earth

from the inside out

they incinerate their own children here

i have seen them scraping their own

8 year olds into garbage bags or compactors…"

These excerpts utilize kinesthetic, tactile imagery to invoke the audience's understanding, viscerally and visually, about relationships with "self" in the presence of pain. It is almost impossible to read these lines without some hesitation of breath. However, the poet does not leave her audience or the poem's speaker to sit with these globes of pain and remembered traumas left undigested.

~~~

Fire breath. My teacher occasionally begins our Sunday-morning asana with a series of fire breaths that warm the body before sun and moon salutations. I particularly enjoy fire breath. Filling my lungs with breath and stretching my arms to their fullest extent, then forcefully bringing them down and releasing every bit of stagnant energy from my lungs. It's like a steam bath for every cell of my body. Usually, as I practice fire breaths, I think of any trauma or pain I have chosen to let reside in my body as I pull my elbows along side my ribs and force my lungs clean. I visualize releasing those traumas and watching them evaporate into thin air.

~~~

As the poem concludes, asha's choice of diction and imagery encourages the healing effects of fire breath. The final stanzas offer images of self-love, dance, and passion that fill the space formerly shared with meditations on and interactions with violence. In these lines, asha exercises mantra like repetition that delivers the persona of "falling in love" with herself and the beauty and complexity there in. Asha writes,

"…this a poem that wants to warn

breathing is a difficult and subtle art

this is a poem to say simply i understand

after three attempts i understand, girl, i do

but this is also a poem willing to assert itself and

say i'm glad, even proud, that i'm a survivor…"

These lines erase the speaker's idea that she is alone in her experiences with violence or healing. Now the speaker recognizes as trauma and violence pepper her life experiences so do creative options for healing illuminate her path.

asha bandale's poem is a performative healing text that elucidates the violence, fear, shame, and confusion that make many Africana women impervious to healing accoutrement required to live effulgent lives. The poem delivers intimate monologue, critical and imagistic analysis of personal and community trauma; and of key import, highlights a journeying process that languages, through voice and movement, self-love as a model for healing. The speaker reveals, "then i'm gonna up and marry myself/ does that sound crazy?" The speaker asks this question because she now understands she must be intensely in love with herself and to the outside world this maybe seen as insanity. Possibly the speaker now believes the superficial education American culture indoctrinates its citizens to believe is love is really an institution acted out on the bodies of Africana women as a means of perpetuating historical and contemporary structures of violence and more over, a world in which women cannot voice, move and journey toward healing. This text recontextualizes recognizable traditional symbols of love (i. e. the institution of marriage, "sensual dancing", and passionate lovemaking") as symbols of healing and intimacy that empower, enrich and connote an intensely intimate relationship with "self". Ultimately when asha writes, "…i'll make love to myself/ and in the heat of passion/ call out my own name…" she challenges her readers to invite breath as model for continued healing and renewal in the face violence.

2007-08-29T12:06:00.001-04:00

i dare not call this your anniversary (for new orleans)

for the city that rests at the bottom of a wellworn boot

for the city that was home before shreveport

for the city that swallows sunshine and sings out sunshine

for the city that taught me to "wobble" and "catch a wall"

for the city that made me reappreciate my southnern songified speech

for the city that is a welcomed hurricane

for the city that gave me a "westbank boo"

for the city that is my favorite phase of the moon

for the city that crawls into your skin like sweat

for the city that makes me wish i grew up second lining

for the city that makes me dance with an umbrella everytime i can

for the city that is a distant home my tongue and fingertips remember

i dare not call this your anniversary i call this a time to reflect on you new orleans i call this a time to think about how you created this world i call this a time to lift your name in song in poem in dance in prayer

cause you are indeed a holy place new orleans a portal where many ancestors entered this realm you are indeed a holy place and no amount of water or ignorance or the invisibility of your children can wash away your legacy

i dare not call this your anniversary cause i have celebrated with your daughters and have whispered to my departed relatives on the shores of your rivers and lakes

if you happen to catch me new orleans on some corner in the french quarter with the hem of my skirt between two fingers know i am dancing for you new orleans and every coin i catch is in your honor

if you happen to catch me new orleans cookin a gumbo outside in the 9th ward know i am feeding your babies new orleans bowl by bowl serving you up like fresh air

i dare not call this your anniversary cause i know how you party how you mourn and how you sit silent and wait for new day to shine

2007-08-18T04:20:00.001-04:00

high)ku~~~a blog about my peru trip

"I Am Wary of Need That Tastes Like Destruction": The Politics of Visibility in Afro-Peruvian Performance and Culture

Audre Lorde reminds us in her poem "Need: A Chorale for Black Women's Voices" of the danger associated with unhealthy, violent relationships and the need for love and connection. I should note, that Lorde's chorale piece was in response to a series of violent acts, specifically murders, against black women. If anyone is interested in reading the piece shoot me a message and I will email it to you. rde is an important entrance to this conversation on the politics of visibility in afro-peruvian performance and culture becuase her work helps us think about sustained performances of oppression and how such performances effect the actualization of individual agency and the politics of this actualization.

These issues have been heavy rotation for the past few weeks. I have been engaging in workshops, lecutres, performances that leave me asking quite plainly where are the black people? I see our artistic practices, which is a type of visibility. I see African features on the bodies of people who do not identify as afro-peruana. I see representations of traditional African religions and spiritual practices, but I don't see many black people. So this is of course a serious problem.

In my conversations, I am learning about the intense and intricately woven history of black people in Peru. Of course there is a legacy of slavery, but I is different from the practices of slavery in the United States. Of course there is a marginilazation of of african people, as most of us live on the outskirts of the large cities, mainly Lima. And do to the history of slavery and geography you will not find many or any black people in Cuzco (due to the altitude) or the Amazon (due to slavery). So most black people are relegated to the outskirts of lima and the coastal areas (where we could thrive on plantation and survive because of similar living conditions that exist in w. africa).

So there is an absence of black bodies, black thought, and black social and artistic movements in peru. Peru has never had a civil rights movement, an uprising or revolution by the black communities. Very few Afro-peruanas attend college in the country and according to a afro-peruana scholar almost no afro-peruanas have attained economic advancement. So literally as I walk (or hobble due to a serious dance accident) or ride around Lima I do not see any black faces.

Peruana scholars speak about the large amount of mixing and passing that happens in the country because of the oppression. so those afro-peruanas who can pass do pass. i must say this is a generalization and i have not spoken directly to someone of afro-peruana descent so all of this is arguable, but i think we could look at the legacy of passing in the united states to draw parallels and analysis based on the politics of skin color that pollutes our own history.

Whether any or all of this is arguable there is an absence.

How do you analyze a disappeared body? The chalk outline is just the frontier. the boundary. The edge. I cannot say it is a beginning? But it does open a question. How does one craft a poem for the imagined presence? Can a poem speak to this truth? Can a poem color in a history? a body? a face that looks like home and tomorrow? How do I search out of absence? How do I search out of absence? How do I search out absence? and find warmth and sunshine and a skin that nods yes to this quest for legacy. An opening is not a beginning. maybe it is the moment before that calls us to take our places at the mark, get set, ready, go.....

So i am looking for blackness in lima with a crew of radical performers and theorists. we are keeping blackness a focus in all of these lectures and performances. two brothas from brazil and a sista from dc and myself are making our desire to see black bodies loud and present. we have chosen not to continue the absence our afro-peruana sisters and brothers are experiencing daily. there are with us and we are thinking and talking about them/us at every turn, every moment of this experience.

so because performance and politics are really one thing, we can look to performance as a way of complicating this already complicated issue. Kimba Fa, a lunch at Rustica, a viewing of Los Musicos Ambulantes, and a mask making workshop all inform my ideas about how performance create both visibility and invisibility for black people.

(to be continued)

ebony

2007-08-18T04:16:00.000-04:00

working my rainbows~~entering performance studies installment

So it is Better to Speak:
Audre Lorde and the Perlocutionary Speech Act

Austin teaches that the perlocutionary act is a method for employing speech for the sole purpose of affecting change. He writes, "Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them" (101). This explanation speaks to how perlocutionary speech is methodically implored to incite a cerebral and visceral change in the audience who partakes in the performance of such an act. One should consider experiencing the radical speeches of the Womanist liberation movement, such and the Combahee River Collective Statement or the writings of Elaine Brown, as examples of such texts. Influential writers, such as Audre Lorde, cast her "words as weapons" as invocations for a sensibility shift, but moreover, a call to direct action to "do" something to alter and dismantle the systematic oppression of Black women during the 1970's.

Austin provides an example of the perlocutionary act in his eighth lecture. He writes, "He persuaded me to shoot her" (102). This example illustrates the two key elements of the perlocutionary act: the statement and the presence of a desired effect. In this basic case one
views the statement and performance through the inclusion of the act of persuading the listening party. One should also notice the desired effect of the speech act as the shooting and possible death of the victim of this violent act.

This explanation provides the much needed backdrop for understanding how Audre Lorde wields the perlocutionary speech act, in her poem "Litany for Survival". In the poem she incites Black women to speak against sexual violence, homophobia, oppression and the culture of silence that encapsulates these issues. The first three stanzas of this poem present a multitude of situations that have historically silenced Black women. She writes, "for those of us who love in doorways/ coming and going…who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice". It is important to note that this silencing is not just a silencing of voice, but also the silencing of action. Perhaps Lorde provides this litany to remind women of their shared trauma. It is possible that this litany serves as a galvanizing tool to agitate the audience and stir the emotions so that when she exclaims, "So it is better to speak…," the audience is prepared to thoroughly absorb these words for the purpose of acting against oppression in their communities.

In Lorde's successful recitation of this poem she leaps beyond the intent to write and share a poem. She performs the act she incites in her audience and by doing so provides a template for how women can use speech to resist oppression. In short, Lorde's speech act, "…successfully achieves or consummates or brings off" (106), the desired effect she encourages her audience members to practice. Austin encourages his readers to consider the successful completion and consequences of perlocutionary speech acts. The trajectory of the Womanist movement and the prevalence of Lorde's oeuvre in contemporary social justice work shows and proves the successful completion and far reaching consequences of her speech act.

2007-08-18T04:13:00.000-04:00

(high)ku a blog about peru
Current mood: anxious

tomorrow there will be sun

your sunless skies are gray
like a traveled beard like confederate slacks
like jazz wrung spiritless your skies are indeed sunless

one of your daughters tells me you own two seasons
the sun season and the sunless season my skin is hungry
for a teaspoon of light for a glimpse of sun against my neck

tomorrow there will be sun even for a moment
the ball of fire will force through the shadows and
greet us like the militant being he is arching our direction

south home now tickling our scalps from heaven

there is no apperance today or yesterday or tomorrow
you have collapsed time and space with your absence
and lima a city kissing the coast is left to sweep the dust and ash