Some months ago, Kiala and I drove through the dark, deer-flanked, eerily quiet and protected streets of Moraga to attend Chris Abani's reading at St. Mary's College. We arrived late and were surprised to find the auditorium filled with an audience of hundreds. As we stood to hear his--as it turned out, fiction--reading, I wondered: who are all these people who have gathered in this corner of the world to hear a poetry reading on a Wednesday night? Did the closed-minded Moragans I grew up around develop a thirst for literature in the ten years since I left that town? Does St. Mary's have incredible publicity for its events throughout the East Bay or entire Bay Area?
As it turned out, the majority of the students were St. Mary's kids, who had been assigned Abani's novel, Graceland, for a class. The novel has won many accolades and international recognition since its publication in 2004, so it would make sense that it be assigned, and that St. Mary's pull out all the stops to bring Abani out for several days of workshops, readings and meals with the college community. Still, there was something unsettling about the situation. We had each been handed bright red half-sheets of paper, instructing us on how to be polite and active participants in this reading. The language of the papers had an air of control and hierarchical authority. Besides attending, many of the undergraduates were required to ask Abani questions about it his book; and so they sprouted a long line behind the microphone. All though most of the questions were benign, some were problematic. One student asked why one of the characters was homosexual. One student asked why so few characters spoke "real English." Abani fielded the questions with grace, introducing the idea that there is no real form of any one language--that that is just a construct--and complicating their perceptions of relationships (romantic or otherwise) between people not of two different, heteronormative genders. However, he also cracked some jokes that made me feel uncomfortable (presumably to win the favor of this sea of sheltered eighteen-year-olds). For example, encouraging one student not to be shy when asking her question by offering to turn around and then offering, in jest, to take off his clothes (playing on the cliche of imagining your audience naked when speaking in public). I felt her could have exercised a little more sensitivity in the representation of his gender in this arena.
Overall, I was happy to hear him read and get a taste of his prose writing, and I was pleased to see St. Mary's seeking him out as their distinguished author for this series. I'm sure the reading of the book and participation in the reading were critical in these students' development and thinkers and global citizens. However, I couldn't shake from my mind the privilege and control of this situation--how much money St. Mary's has to put on an event like this, and the culture it has established amongst undergrads of dictating the decorum of the event. Granted, it is important to establish a positive, respectful atmosphere--but being present at this event made me feel like I was in high school again... maybe just because I got stuck going to high school in Moraga. I'm curious to see Abani perform in another setting, to get a sense of how performers present and transform themselves depending on the genre they are reading from and whom they are reading to.
Friday, December 4, 2009
MBJ at Berkeley Rep
I was so glad to get to see Marc Bamuthi Joseph perform in this setting (at Berkeley Rep), especially after seeing him perform excerpts of the same show for Works in Progress. Amazingly, both performances felt like an intimate experience--even though one was in the company of two or three dozen people (most of whom I knew) in a well-lit room in which Marc could easily move through the audience, and the other was in the company of hundreds (most of whom I didn't know) sitting in tiered darkness while Marc performed on a distant, lit stage. Comparing these two experiences made it clear that Marc is the kind of performer who can make his audience feel comfortable, and draw them in, despite the size of the venue.
Of course, the audience also plays a big part in making the performer feel comfortable. As Youth Speaks brings conscious performers to many different parts of the country, the performers don't always know what kind of reception they're going to get from their audience. Marc repeatedly announced, in intervals, how enlivening it was to perform before an engaged, familiar Berkeley audience--something that probably added to his comfort, and, added to my experience of feeling personally engaged in his performance.
It was also very powerful to see his pieces enhanced by lighting and amplified sound, and to experience the accompaniment by the MC. I was amazed by Marc's performance at Mills, fulling using his body and his own vocal capacity, but I hadn't experienced the poems/narratives fully until I was able to see and hear the full affect onstage.
Marc's work demonstrated how poetry and performance can work hand-in-hand with memoir and journalism. We had characters, we had stories from youth (interviewing Jay-Z was a personal favorite), we had travelogue. I loved the pieces because they were so intensely personal, but always with a political message or consideration behind the sizzling lyrical language and movement.
Of course, the audience also plays a big part in making the performer feel comfortable. As Youth Speaks brings conscious performers to many different parts of the country, the performers don't always know what kind of reception they're going to get from their audience. Marc repeatedly announced, in intervals, how enlivening it was to perform before an engaged, familiar Berkeley audience--something that probably added to his comfort, and, added to my experience of feeling personally engaged in his performance.
It was also very powerful to see his pieces enhanced by lighting and amplified sound, and to experience the accompaniment by the MC. I was amazed by Marc's performance at Mills, fulling using his body and his own vocal capacity, but I hadn't experienced the poems/narratives fully until I was able to see and hear the full affect onstage.
Marc's work demonstrated how poetry and performance can work hand-in-hand with memoir and journalism. We had characters, we had stories from youth (interviewing Jay-Z was a personal favorite), we had travelogue. I loved the pieces because they were so intensely personal, but always with a political message or consideration behind the sizzling lyrical language and movement.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
reading response #2
so, i wrote this a while ago when it actually happened & never posted it. yay, here it is:
This weekend’s events still feel like they’re happening, in all honesty. Staceyann Chin isn’t boarding my flight with me right now, but she was just at my gate out of Dulles after an insane weekend of a hundred thousand queers marching on the capitol for equal rights under the law.
I wouldn’t call Staceyann’s speech on Sunday so much of a poem as I would a performance. I’m sure you can find it on youtube by now, but seeing her face surrounded by microphones and news cameras just might ruin it. I heard her speech from 50,000 people deep and could not see her at all. Just her voice. Just her voice over the pa system and even then, sometimes the cheering drowned her out. There had been about fifteen speakers before her, including Judy Shepard, Lt. Dan Choi, Julian Bond and a number of young transfolk who spoke about the importance of education, visibility, endurance and conviction.
By the time she came to the podium, the crowd had become well-versed in the language and cadence of protest. All of us had marched for nearly three miles, screaming, singing & chanting. Staceyann and I, along with the other poets performing at smaller events throughout the day were hoarse before we even passed the White House. The speakers before Staceyann, even the young folks, all had that predictable rhythm and shift of volume in their voices when speaking. They knew when the crowd would erupt, they knew when to speak softly so that the entire mall strained to hear.
When Staceyann came to the mic, everybody woke up. Several people around me stood to up to listen. When she talked about her coming out story in Jamaica and the trauma that followed, there was a sense that everyone was holding their breath. In the face of all the criticism this march has received since its planning stages, I felt like that moment was exactly what made it worthwhile. Yes, absolutely, the whole thing was an important demonstration of community and the power of grassroots collaboration. But in light of Obama’s speech the night before, and all the promises he made, when Staceyann was on stage it seemed as if she enacted a turning point for the crowd. Change was not only possible, but inevitable. She talked frankly about the “places we [queers] are always fleeing” and that in order to create spaces that refused that, it was all about the breath and the repetition. BAM!
This weekend’s events still feel like they’re happening, in all honesty. Staceyann Chin isn’t boarding my flight with me right now, but she was just at my gate out of Dulles after an insane weekend of a hundred thousand queers marching on the capitol for equal rights under the law.
I wouldn’t call Staceyann’s speech on Sunday so much of a poem as I would a performance. I’m sure you can find it on youtube by now, but seeing her face surrounded by microphones and news cameras just might ruin it. I heard her speech from 50,000 people deep and could not see her at all. Just her voice. Just her voice over the pa system and even then, sometimes the cheering drowned her out. There had been about fifteen speakers before her, including Judy Shepard, Lt. Dan Choi, Julian Bond and a number of young transfolk who spoke about the importance of education, visibility, endurance and conviction.
By the time she came to the podium, the crowd had become well-versed in the language and cadence of protest. All of us had marched for nearly three miles, screaming, singing & chanting. Staceyann and I, along with the other poets performing at smaller events throughout the day were hoarse before we even passed the White House. The speakers before Staceyann, even the young folks, all had that predictable rhythm and shift of volume in their voices when speaking. They knew when the crowd would erupt, they knew when to speak softly so that the entire mall strained to hear.
When Staceyann came to the mic, everybody woke up. Several people around me stood to up to listen. When she talked about her coming out story in Jamaica and the trauma that followed, there was a sense that everyone was holding their breath. In the face of all the criticism this march has received since its planning stages, I felt like that moment was exactly what made it worthwhile. Yes, absolutely, the whole thing was an important demonstration of community and the power of grassroots collaboration. But in light of Obama’s speech the night before, and all the promises he made, when Staceyann was on stage it seemed as if she enacted a turning point for the crowd. Change was not only possible, but inevitable. She talked frankly about the “places we [queers] are always fleeing” and that in order to create spaces that refused that, it was all about the breath and the repetition. BAM!
post-script 11/09: this event & the things that staceyann said about marriage and the fight for equality have sparked some interesting debates. i went to the march as a supporter of the repeal of prop 8 & came away with really different views and a fuller understanding of the ways that we, as poets (and as queers), buy into and aid what may end up being the wrong side of the fight. i'm not saying that i don't support equality (i do! i do! i do!), but that i have really different ideas now, after hearing staceyann talk, about the ways in which we might all root for equality (and by all, i mean ALL, not just the queer folx).
xomegday
xomegday
reading response #1
So, over a month ago I went to this event in San Francisco at CounterPulse that included a performance by "Universes," a cross-genre performance group. It was BAD ASS.
Ritual is on my mind because Kiala & I are writing these poems about tradition and ritual in our own lives (and the ways those rituals intersect). Universes’ performance(s) redefined, for me, the idea of hip-hop/spoken word/music as ceremony. It was obvious to me as soon as I arrived that I had never considered my own readings and performances as ritual, even though I often do the same thing before each performance. I wear the same shoes (a uniform, of sorts), I jump up and down in the same ritualistic way that busts out some extra adrenaline, and I always sign the first few lines of all of my pieces to myself while mingling with folks beforehand as the crowd is settling or other performers are backstage prepping. I had to watch this happen at CounterPulse in order to recognize it in myself. This seems just as important for the performer as it does the audience. There is the ritual of waiting for the doors to open, the awkward but buzzing meet and greet outside, the rush for the right seat, then the patient flipping through of programs.
While Universes was a great indicator of how, exactly, to truly engage an audience and how to seamlessly piece a show together, the performances seemed most illustrative, at all times, of ceremony. The lights, the patterns in which each member spoke or performed, and the obvious ease with which the rehearsal of this ceremony had made possible, all conveyed, very seriously, that they had command of the room. As an audience member, I felt transported. I was not sitting in the corner of a blackbox theatre with an intimate crowd, I was somewhere else entirely. More impressive, however, was how the sole woman on stage seemed to grasp her position as implied Master of Ceremonies throughout the evening. The sound rarely stopped, the bodies rarely stopped and loop after loop, the breaks kept coming.
Politics, code-switching and a variety of literacies were definitely at play and I appreciated not having full, VIP-access to every single section of the "ceremony." Even without knowing her language or understanding all of the inside jokes, I still felt like I was invited to partake by the one woman on stage. She shut down the room with her voice, with their stories, and every time the stories shifted and looped back to the music, the break was definitely the point of heightened possibility, regardless of who you were or where you came from. That kind of accessibility is essential, I think. I also found it really interesting that even when the rhythm was strong, if that lead female voice maxed out and cracked (which it did, because they were tired or sick or on the road for a long time), then that break broke too. She was the conduit to that alternate space and only she, in that moment, could keep it looping.
Universes taught me a lot about the importance of seamless performance and the necessity of layering. A single layer is impressive, but it doesn’t move on its own. I felt like Chinaka Hodge’s “Mirrors In Every Corner” excerpt (she performed before Universes as a kind of "opener") illustrated this in indispensable ways. Despite being the only person on stage (during the excerpt), she used the space, the lights, her body and her words (not to mention the way she dressed and talked) to create those layers without needing other folks on the stage. She broke my brain. It was like seeing Karl Iglesias from Madison perform for the first time and not knowing what I was seeing, but feeling it. I cannot wait for the rest of Chinaka’s play in 2010. She gave me so much to think about. Years worth in five minutes.
xomegday
Ritual is on my mind because Kiala & I are writing these poems about tradition and ritual in our own lives (and the ways those rituals intersect). Universes’ performance(s) redefined, for me, the idea of hip-hop/spoken word/music as ceremony. It was obvious to me as soon as I arrived that I had never considered my own readings and performances as ritual, even though I often do the same thing before each performance. I wear the same shoes (a uniform, of sorts), I jump up and down in the same ritualistic way that busts out some extra adrenaline, and I always sign the first few lines of all of my pieces to myself while mingling with folks beforehand as the crowd is settling or other performers are backstage prepping. I had to watch this happen at CounterPulse in order to recognize it in myself. This seems just as important for the performer as it does the audience. There is the ritual of waiting for the doors to open, the awkward but buzzing meet and greet outside, the rush for the right seat, then the patient flipping through of programs.
While Universes was a great indicator of how, exactly, to truly engage an audience and how to seamlessly piece a show together, the performances seemed most illustrative, at all times, of ceremony. The lights, the patterns in which each member spoke or performed, and the obvious ease with which the rehearsal of this ceremony had made possible, all conveyed, very seriously, that they had command of the room. As an audience member, I felt transported. I was not sitting in the corner of a blackbox theatre with an intimate crowd, I was somewhere else entirely. More impressive, however, was how the sole woman on stage seemed to grasp her position as implied Master of Ceremonies throughout the evening. The sound rarely stopped, the bodies rarely stopped and loop after loop, the breaks kept coming.
Politics, code-switching and a variety of literacies were definitely at play and I appreciated not having full, VIP-access to every single section of the "ceremony." Even without knowing her language or understanding all of the inside jokes, I still felt like I was invited to partake by the one woman on stage. She shut down the room with her voice, with their stories, and every time the stories shifted and looped back to the music, the break was definitely the point of heightened possibility, regardless of who you were or where you came from. That kind of accessibility is essential, I think. I also found it really interesting that even when the rhythm was strong, if that lead female voice maxed out and cracked (which it did, because they were tired or sick or on the road for a long time), then that break broke too. She was the conduit to that alternate space and only she, in that moment, could keep it looping.
Universes taught me a lot about the importance of seamless performance and the necessity of layering. A single layer is impressive, but it doesn’t move on its own. I felt like Chinaka Hodge’s “Mirrors In Every Corner” excerpt (she performed before Universes as a kind of "opener") illustrated this in indispensable ways. Despite being the only person on stage (during the excerpt), she used the space, the lights, her body and her words (not to mention the way she dressed and talked) to create those layers without needing other folks on the stage. She broke my brain. It was like seeing Karl Iglesias from Madison perform for the first time and not knowing what I was seeing, but feeling it. I cannot wait for the rest of Chinaka’s play in 2010. She gave me so much to think about. Years worth in five minutes.
xomegday
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