Scott first became (in)famous 30 years ago with his installation What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?, which has incited controversy virtually every time it has been exhibited since 1989. This weekend will see his largest-scale project: a re-enactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which up to 500 enslaved people marched on New Orleans from nearby sugar plantations. Perhaps surprisingly, Scott is doing this with the support of Louisiana officials. – The New York Times
Tag: sj
‘Slave Play’ Author Jeremy O. Harris Has Made For Himself A ‘For Colored Girls’-Style ‘Choreopoem’
“The new work, Black Exhibition” — which he developed under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher — “is described in the script as an attempt ‘to look at a queer black male psyche through the lens of its literary influences'” — those being, among others, Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany and Yukio Mishima. – The New York Times
Why Jeremy O. Harris Had A Special Performance Of His ‘Slave Play’ For A Black Audience
“That was me being able to look certain people in the face and say: ‘You’re wrong.’ So many people have dictated what my intentions were with Slave Play. One of the things they’ve always articulated is that I wrote Slave Play for white people and that it’s not written for a black audience. That’s so bizarre to me. … It was amazing to sit in a 99.9% black audience and see that 99.9% of the play worked. And the parts that exhilarated the audience on other nights still exhilarated the audience that night.” – The Guardian
What It’s Like To Study Ballet While Black
Felicia Fitzpatrick: “With its European roots, ballet has always valued Eurocentric body shapes and skin color, leaving little opportunity for Black ballerinas to even attempt to engage with the art form. Even if they were allowed to participate, they were still othered and singled out for their race.” – Zora
Playwright William B. Branch Dead At 92
“As a playwright Mr. Branch delved into the black experience, both in the 20th century and earlier, in Off-Broadway plays like A Medal for Willie, about the bitterness that ensues when a black World War II veteran who had been mistreated in the service is decorated posthumously; A Wreath for Udomo, with its theme of colonial oppression in South Africa; and In Splendid Error, about the tangled relationship between the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown.” – The New York Times
Ernest J. Gaines, Author Of ‘Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman’ And ‘A Lesson Before Dying’, Dead At 86
“Mr. Gaines, who spent his first 15 years on a plantation near Baton Rouge, later moved with his family to Northern California, but in many ways he never left the landscape, rhythms and painful history of his childhood. … In eight novels and many short stories, Mr. Gaines created a fictional world surrounding a town called Bayonne, in St. Raphael Parish, not unlike his boyhood home.” – The Washington Post
Meet Colombia’s Grand Entrepreneur Of Graffiti
“Where the average eye sees empty and drab building walls, [Camilo Fidel] López, the founder of the graffiti artists crew Vértigo Graffiti, sees blank canvases, opportunities to colorfully further the cause of social justice, whether in his home city — the Colombian capital, Bogotá — or the rest of the world. … Not a graffiti artist himself, Mr. López plays multiple roles: art director, business manager, promoter, negotiator, lawyer, entrepreneur, festival producer, even tour guide.” – The New York Times
Anna Deavere Smith Hands Over The Docu-Play That Made Her Famous — And For Which She Did All The Interviews — To Another Actor
A revival of Fires in the Mirror, Smith’s 1992 solo show about the riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and the tension between Caribbean Blacks and Hasidic Jews there, is opening in New York next week. For the first time, all 29 parts are being played by another actor: Michael Benjamin Washington. Salamishah Tillet interviews both of them about the handover. – The New York Times
When Indigenous Land Is Acknowledged Before A Performance, For Whom Is It Really Being Done?
It’s happening more and more, as part of the curtain speech or separately: a speaker formally acknowledges that, for example, “we are on Lenape land” (in the case of New York City). Lauren Wingenroth considers reasons for and ways of doing this without it becoming an empty or token gesture. – Dance Magazine
The Met Museum Attracts A Million People To Its Events Each Year. That’s Changing The Museum
Sandra Jackson-Dumont: “I’m trying to move the idea away from people being visitors to the museum to being users. You to go to a library to use it, right? You’re not a visitor to the library. I’ve been talking about how can we make this place the extension of what people do in their daily lives.” – ShondaLand