Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

      by

      The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Pearl Bowser, Expert in Early Black Filmmakers, Dies at 92

      by

      She aided in the rediscovery of Oscar Micheaux and others who were telling stories for Black audiences early in the last century.Pearl Bowser, a film historian, curator and collector who was instrumental in preserving and bringing to light the works of Black filmmakers from early in the last century, especially those of Oscar Micheaux, whom one writer described as “the Jackie Robinson of American film,” died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. She was 92.Her daughter Gillian Bowser confirmed the death.Ms. Bowser developed an interest in the forgotten works of early Black filmmakers in the 1960s when, while working as a researcher on a colleague’s idea for a book about Micheaux, she traveled to California from New York to interview aging actors who had been in movies made by Micheaux decades earlier.She began hunting down and collecting movies by Micheaux and other Black filmmakers from the early decades of the 1900s — works that were, for that period, triumphs of independent filmmaking, since they were generally made on shoestring budgets and sometimes dealt with topics that mainstream movies would not touch. Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920), for instance, was an indictment of the Ku Klux Klan.In addition to being a student of film, Ms. Bowser made a few films herself.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureThose films also serve as historical documents, depicting Black communities in ways not seen in mainstream movies of the time.“Oscar Micheaux’s early films are full of ordinary settings of community: the church, the house, the apartment,” Ms. Bowser told USA Today in 1998. “You see the way people lived in that period.”By the early 1970s, Ms. Bowser was curating film series, taking the works she had discovered by Micheaux and others into theaters and classrooms. She continued to do that for decades.“They were telling stories that were not being shown on the screen, Black stories,” she told students at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey in 2004 before showing them “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (a film that, like others of Micheaux’s, was shot in Fort Lee). “And by showing the Black experience, we’re telling the American story in its totality.”Donald Bogle, the noted film historian, said Ms. Bowser’s work on Micheaux was pivotal.“Not much was known or acknowledged about Micheaux for too long a time,” he said by email. “But Pearl made it her mission to bring his work and career to light. Over the years, she devotedly dug for information on him, and I can remember those occasions when she excitedly told me about new things she was unearthing.”Among the places her search took her, she said in newspaper interviews, were the national archives of Spain and Belgium, where she found silent classics by Micheaux with the title cards written in the languages of those countries, which she then had to have translated back into English.In 2000, she and Louise Spence published “Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences.”“Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s scholarly examination of Micheaux serves a dual purpose,” Renée Graham wrote in a review in The Boston Globe. “Through six essays, they analyze Micheaux’s work, how it was received by both Blacks and whites, and how his films encouraged fresh discussions about race. But Bowser and Spence’s book also rescues the filmmaker’s accomplishments from decades of obscurity.”Ms. Bowser’s expertise, though, encompassed much more than Micheaux-era films. Her lectures and film series covered a wide range — for instance, she presented “Films of Africa and the Caribbean” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1986. And the collection of hundreds of films, videotapes and audiotapes she donated in 2012 to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution is rich in material related to Black filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s.“Pearl didn’t just revive Micheaux’s legacy; she helped preserve and shape the narrative of independent Black film,” Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist at the museum, said by email. “Across her five-decade career she wove a continuous thread through a century of Black film that is only just now beginning to come into focus.”Pearl Johnson was born on June 25, 1931, in Harlem, where she grew up. According to a Smithsonian Institution biography, her mother, also named Pearl, was a domestic worker, and young Pearl would often accompany her to work at apartments in Lower Manhattan, helping to fold handkerchiefs in exchange for an allowance.As a child she came to know Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, a Harlem underworld figure who was also well known in the borough for giving out food baskets and encouraging children to borrow books from his vast library.“I remember one time I mentioned to Bumpy that I wanted to grow up to be a philosopher,” Ms. Bowser told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, “and he said, ‘I’ve got a book you might be interested in.’”He gave her something by Friedrich Nietzsche. She was about 15 and didn’t understand a word.“It taught me to think before I spoke to Bumpy,” she said. “because even though I was young, he took me and my dreams quite seriously.”Later, according to the Smithsonian biography, she worked in one of his numbers joints. She also studied for a time at Brooklyn College before dropping out and taking a job at CBS, where she worked on a team that analyzed television ratings.In 1955 she married LeRoy Bowser, who would later become a regional vice president of the National Urban League. He died in 1986. Her daughter Gillian survives her. Another daughter, Joralemon Bowser, died in 1978.Ms. Bowser made a few films herself, including “Midnight Ramble,” a documentary she made with Bestor Cram for the PBS series “The American Experience” about “race movies,” as films made by Micheaux and others for Black audiences were called.In the late 1960s Ms. Bowser also wrote a newspaper cooking column. In 1970, with Joan Eckstein, she published her best recipes in a book, “A Pinch of Soul.”“The authors,” one reviewer said, “provide a complete array of soul food cookery to fit the needs of today’s elegant hostess.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Paul Robeson’ Review: A Tribute to an Entertainment Titan

      by

      The film’s subtitle is drawn from one of the performer’s quotes in his autobiography “Here I Stand”: “I’m a Negro. I’m an American.”The opening of “Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’” offers an unintentional caveat about the 1989 documentary directed by the East German filmmaker Kurt Tetzlaff. Paul Robeson’s rich baritone undergirds archival footage of Black children playing in a dusty open space, smokestacks in the background. The use by the director of a Negro spiritual, however beautiful, swaps whatever joy these kids might have been experiencing (they are at play after all) for a questionable sentimentality around Black life and suffering.But then much of Tetzlaff’s documentary, recently restored and receiving its first theatrical run in New York, casts an aura — admiring and melancholy — around Robeson to the detriment of a more shaded portrait. The athlete-performer-activist’s achievements are well known (gridiron great, Columbia University Law graduate, first Black Othello on Broadway), but in this film, their roots and meaning go mostly unexplored.The documentary shows glimmers of promise when featuring interviewees who had an intimate grasp of the America that shaped but also tore down Robeson. Harry Belafonte turns teary talking about Robeson’s grace. The singer Pete Seeger’s account of white rioters attacking attendees at a Peekskill, N.Y., concert in support of workers in 1949 remains chilling. Tetzlaff aims to dive into Robeson’s mistreatment by the United States government for his activism, as well as his expressed admiration of the Soviet Union and its people — but the movie sticks to the shallow end.Hinted at, but never fully realized here, is a more compelling film about the tantalizing promise Black progressives like Robeson held for Eastern Bloc citizens, like the director.Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’Not rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Bobby Schiffman, Guiding Force of the Apollo Theater, Dies at 94

      by

      Taking over for his father in 1961, he transformed a former vaudeville house in Harlem into a pre-eminent R&B showcase.Bobby Schiffman, who guided the Apollo Theater in Harlem through the seismic cultural and musical changes of the 1960s and early ’70s, cementing its place as a world-renowned showcase for Black music and entertainment, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.In 1961, Mr. Schiffman inherited the reins of the storied neoclassical Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Manhattan from his father, Frank Schiffman. The elder Mr. Schiffman, along with a financial partner, Leo Brecher, had taken over the theater — a former burlesque house that opened in 1914 as a whites-only establishment — in 1935.Frank Schiffman transformed the theater from a vaudeville house hosting acts like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers into an epicenter for Black artists performing for largely Black audiences in an era of de facto cultural segregation. During the 1930s and ’40s, the elder Mr. Schiffman provided early exposure to countless African American luminaries, including Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.Frank Schiffman was respected and feared for his fierce competitiveness. “In Harlem show business circles he was God — a five-foot-nine-inch, white, Jewish, balding, bespectacled deity,” the music writer Ted Fox observed in his 1983 book, “Showtime at the Apollo.”Bobby, the younger of his two sons, was more affable and easygoing, but lacked none of his father’s drive or ambition.“I don’t think Bobby Schiffman gets enough credit for being a great impresario,” Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. “Through enormous changes in musical tastes, styles and culture in general, he kept the theater going, doing 31 shows a week, seven days a week, year after year for decades, in a way that no other theater has ever been able to do.”His father had run the theater along the old vaudeville model, as a venue for variety shows. “Frank was old school,” Howard Schiffman said of his grandfather in a phone interview. “He was like Ed Sullivan. He thought that there should be a juggler and an animal act on every show.”Mr. Schiffman, second from left, with his father, Frank Schiffman; the tap dancer Honi Coles, who worked for many years as the Apollo’s production manager; and, standing, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son and later the leader of the Ellington orchestra. Mr. Schiffman took over the Apollo from his father in 1961.via Apollo Theater“My father,” he added, “turned the Apollo into the R&B showcase that it became.”Faced with keeping the lights on at a compact 1,500-seat theater with little financial cushion, Bobby Schiffman “made it his business to find out what the people in the streets were listening to,” Mr. Fox said.“He would go into the bars and see what was on the jukebox,” he added, “he would talk to local D.J.s and record store owners to find out what was coming out, and book them while they were still unknown.”Winners of the theater’s famous and long-running Wednesday Amateur Night during Mr. Schiffman’s tenure included Gladys Knight, Ronnie Spector, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5.By providing support and exposure, he nurtured young stars “before they became superstars,” Mr. Fox said, “and would later appeal to them to appear, at great financial sacrifice, to come back and play for the people who made them.”During the years Mr. Schiffman managed the Apollo, it became a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said.Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesDuring Mr. Schiffman’s tenure as manager, the Apollo served not only as a launching pad to fame but also, eventually, as a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said. “It was the most important theater in the world. Once you could say you had played the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere.”The Apollo’s reputation went global, thanks in part to hit live recordings made there by stars like James Brown, an Apollo regular, who recorded the landmark album “‘Live’ at the Apollo” in October 1962. Widely regarded as one of the great live albums, it hit No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and remained in the Top 10 for 39 weeks.The Apollo’s reputation went global thanks in part to albums like James Brown’s “‘Live’ at the Apollo,” which spent 39 weeks in the Billboard Top 10 in 1963.King“For years,” Mr. Schiffman said in a 2014 interview with The Daily News in New York, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere and it would be delivered. How many theaters can you say that about?”Robert Lee Schiffman was born on Feb. 12, 1929, in Manhattan, the youngest of Frank and Lee Schiffman’s three children.He grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb north of the city, where he attended A.B. Davis High School with Dick Clark, the future host of “American Bandstand.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University, Mr. Schiffman spent the early 1950s working his way up the ladder at the Apollo. “He did every terrible job in the place, from cleaning bathrooms to taking tickets,” his son said.During Mr. Schiffman’s heyday at the Apollo in the 1960s, his office functioned as a nerve center for Black culture. Local politicians like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and sports stars like Muhammad Ali would drop by for a chat.By the 1970s, however, Harlem was being increasingly buffeted by drugs, crime and economic decline, and the live-music business was changing. With color barriers in music breaking down, the Apollo was unable to maintain its lure for artists who had become arena-packing juggernauts.“The big stars would say, ‘We love you, Bobby, but we can play the Apollo and sell 1,500 tickets or play Madison Square Garden and sell 18,000,’” Howard Schiffman said.Mr. Schiffman finally shuttered the theater in 1976. The Apollo reopened under new management in 1978 but closed again the next year. In 1981, the media and technology executive Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, purchased the theater with a group of investors. It was declared a state and city landmark in 1983, and in 1991 it was taken over by the Apollo Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization.Mr. Schiffman later oversaw the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, N.Y., before retiring to Florida.In addition to his son, from his marriage to Joan Landy, which ended in divorce in 1973, he is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy (Rothman) Schiffman; his stepsons from that marriage, Barry and Michael Rothman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandsons. His marriages to Renee Levy and Rusty Donner also ended in divorce.While the Apollo became famous for its stars and spectacle, Mr. Schiffman never forgot its unique role as a locus for Harlem life.“We were in the business of pleasing the Black community,” he said in an interview for the book “Showtime at the Apollo.” “If white folks came as an ancillary benefit, that was fine. But the basic motto was to bring the people of the community entertainment they wanted at a price they could afford to pay.”When he overstepped his bounds, the community let him know. “The highest price I ever charged was six dollars,” Mr. Schiffman added. “I tried seven for Redd Foxx once, and they stayed away in droves.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      When the Wig Is a Character: Backstage at Jocelyn Bioh’s New Play

      by

      The styles in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” in previews on Broadway, require a wig designer, several braiders, some synthetic hair and lots of patience.Known for her amusing scripts and plaited hairstyles, Jocelyn Bioh can count only three times when she was without braids. “There’s a real freedom in getting your braids done,” she said. “Then you don’t have to worry about your hair for the next few weeks.”The playwright’s lifelong commitment to interwoven hairdos inspired “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a Broadway comedy about a day in the life of a hair braiding salon. It’s most likely the first Broadway play to shine a spotlight on Black women’s hair, and what it takes to style it.Set in Central Harlem, around 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (where many of these salons are clustered), “Jaja’s” presents a spirited group of West African hair stylists as their designs take shape and they juggle the uncertainties and perplexities of their new lives here. Because these women are rarely part of conversations about immigration, Bioh felt it was important for audiences to hear their stories.In writing the play, Bioh (“Nollywood Dreams,” “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”) sought to put a face to something that was likely to be unfamiliar to many theatergoers. “I want to take them into this really unique, funny, crazy, exciting, in some ways mundane space that holds women who all have incredible stories,” said Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana. “That’s what I’m trying to unpack in my play. What’s the other? What’s in the other?”A mock-up of the wig, one of the play’s more colorful hair designs.Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis. Cast members, who braid hair onstage, practiced during rehearsals on wigs she designed for the performance.“There are so many moving pieces to the show that involve hair, and it’s not just me backstage,” Mathis said. “It’s also the actors onstage, it’s what Jocelyn has written, and it’s what Whitney will be helping us to reveal.”“Part of that,” she continued, “is going to be the magic of figuring out how we’re going to construct the wigs and how to potentially take them apart.”The show is running about 90 minutes, without an intermission, yet these hairstyles can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day to complete. There’s also the art of the craft. Creating a single braid starts with a cluster of hair: fingertips planted against the scalp, grasped at the roots of three sectioned tufts, deftly and repeatedly crocheted until a pattern emerges. The options are endless. The humble braid can stand alone, of course, but when woven loosely, it becomes the box braid. Woven against the scalp, it becomes the cornrow. Woven infinitesimally, it becomes the micro.Building wigs that mimic these looks is labor intensive, and audiences are just beginning to see how the production, in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, pulls it off. This summer we followed along on the assembly and design of one of the flashier styles, a wig known as Jaja’s Strawberry-Swirl Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, worn by the actress Kalyne Coleman in the show.Sew, Braid, Dye: One Wig, Many HandsThe wig-making process begins when a gallon-size poly bag is fitted on the actor’s head to make a mold. Once the measurements are taken and the hairline is drawn, the bag is removed, and the mold is filled with polyester fiber and placed on a canvas wig block. Lace is secured to the frame, which serves as the wig’s foundation, and finally strands of hair are sewn in one by one.The show’s hair and wig designer, Nikiya Mathis, dyes the wigs in a solution of water and semi-permanent color. The more saturated the water is with dye, the deeper the pigment. She then agitates the hair to ensure all the strands attain the desired hue.The hair design team builds the look together, with each stylist completing one braid at a time. Human hair is woven into the lace infrastructure, then small pieces of synthetic hair are added to give each braid length and fullness. More synthetic hair is bunched and teased at the ends of each braid to create volume for the puff.Before the fitting, Kalyne Coleman’s real hair was braided into cornrows, which sit close to her head, so that the wig would fit over it easily. Then a stocking cap is placed over her head and secured with pins. The wig is then applied, and baby hair is pulled out. The edges are curled with gel to complete the look. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      Singing Competition Again Comes Under Fire After Use of Blackface

      by

      Contestants on a recent episode of a Polish reality TV show used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé. It was not the first time the racist tradition had been featured.A reality TV singing competition in Poland is under fire after two contestants used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé during an episode that aired over the weekend.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” (or, in Polish, “Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo”) appears in multiple countries, including the United States, where it ran on ABC for one season in 2014 and was called “Sing Your Face Off.” The show encourages contestants to recreate the appearance and sound of famous singers as accurately as possible.In Saturday’s episode of “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” the singer Kuba Szmajkowski won with his rendition of Mr. Lamar’s “Humble.” Mr. Szmajkowski performed in blackface and wore his hair in cornrows in order to look like Mr. Lamar.Mr. Szmajkowski posted video of his transformation to his 163,000 Instagram followers, with the caption “get ready with Kendrick.” The video showed the singer in front of a mirror getting multiple layers of makeup applied. A representative for Mr. Szmajkowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.While Mr. Szmajkowski’s post about his transformation received thousands of likes, hundreds of people commented on it, many of them expressing criticism and anger.“This is top racism. Do you not see how inappropriate this is? Not to mention offensive? Wrong,” one user wrote.Another contestant in Saturday’s episode, Pola Gonciarz, performed Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” also using blackface in an effort to evoke the look of the superstar.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” is produced by Endemol Shine Poland, which is owned by the French company Banijay. In a statement, the company said, “Banijay condemns Endemol Shine Poland’s local execution of ‘Your Face Sounds Familiar,’ which contradicts our group’s global values.” A spokeswoman declined to provide more details until an investigation is completed.It’s not the first time the program has come under fire for the use of blackface. In 2021, a white contestant wore blackface to portray Kanye West performing “Stronger.”In response to that criticism, the show said the negative comments were surprising. “The Polish edition of the show, seen as exemplary abroad, always tries to show great performances, which strive to be as close to the original as possible,” an Instagram post from the show read at the time.This time around, “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” which is in its 19th season, has not yet publicly responded.The show’s Instagram account indicates that multiple contestants have dressed in blackface to perform as Black singers, including Snoop Dogg, Ray Charles, Bill Withers and Missy Elliott. Mia Moody-Ramirez, a professor at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in how race is portrayed in the media, said Mr. Szmajkowski’s performance was particularly offensive because of the combination of blackface, cornrows and his use of a racial slur, which is among the song’s lyrics.She said the continued use of blackface on the show might be because the stigma surrounding it is smaller in Poland, which has a population that is overwhelmingly white, than it is in the United States. About 97 percent of Poland’s population identifies as ethnically Polish, according to Minority Rights Group International.“We are living in a global society,” Dr. Moody-Ramirez said. “If it is produced in one country, it is going to be seen around the world.”In the United States, blackface dates back to early 19th-century minstrel shows, and the racist tradition — even though widely condemned — has persisted, showing up at bachelor parties, in old photos of politicians and elsewhere. The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the 1950s, but it has not disappeared around the world.In Europe, too, there has been something of a reckoning. In Britain in 2020, some comedy shows that included blackface or racial slurs were removed from streaming platforms, including BBC’s iPlayer and Netflix. And in the Netherlands, a holiday tradition in which people dress in blackface to portray Black Pete, a servant to St. Nicholas, is slowly changing. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      When Club Music Went Commercial, Remixes Kept It Real

      by

      Social justice, romance and gay pride are alive in a sound that would seduce the world.We gathered each Sunday. The place of worship: Tracks, a mammoth warehouse-turned-nightclub in Southeast Washington, D.C. We were a congregation of mostly Black gay men, there to celebrate one another, at a time — the early 1990s — when we were losing so many to AIDS. We danced — many vogued — to the music that endured after the anti-Black, anti-gay “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s. This fledgling genre transformed dance music, through synthesizers, drum machines and the scrappiness of youth, into a sound that would seduce the world. Some would “call it house,” as the duo Mass Order sang on “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away),” from 1991.So many songs reflected my values and interests: social injustice (CeCe Rogers, “Someday”), romance (MAW & Company featuring Xaviera Gold, “Gonna Get Back to You”), recovering from heartbreak (Ultra Naté, “It’s Over Now”) and gay pride (Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way”). Other cuts I cherished weren’t songs written for the clubs, but remixes: R&B and pop songs reconfigured for the dance floor.Life is a remix. Or at least mine has been. Like many, I grew up exploring identity through pop culture. But being Black and gay, I felt most mainstream entertainment didn’t affirm my place in the world. I nevertheless sifted through mass media, embracing what served me, discarding what didn’t. This process of fashioning custom-fitted couture from cultural ready-to-wear is epitomized by the remix. “Remix” has a range of meanings, but in general it refers to a practice, with roots in Jamaican reggae, in which D.J.s and producers take a pre-existing song and tweak it for a specific audience. I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music.In the 1990s — when the advances from increased gay visibility bucked up against the backlash triggered by AIDS — remixes attested that the music cultivated in Black gay spaces had larger cultural value. It meant something to me when, say, Diana Ross reached out to a younger generation with “Workin’ Overtime (House Mix),” Jody Watley transformed into a sinister cyborg on “I’m the One You Need (Dead Zone Mix)” and Mariah Carey went on a historical Black music journey, evoking jazz, gospel and soul on “Anytime You Need a Friend (Dave’s Empty Pass).”I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music. Remixes can free a song from the dictates of radio trends, marketability and the pop conventions of boy-meets-girl. For example, Watley’s song “When a Man Loves a Woman” was released with the remixes “When a Woman Loves a Woman” and “When a Man Loves a Man.” One of my favorite remixes is Quincy Jones’s “Listen Up (Chakapella Dub Mix),” by Arthur Baker. Baker uses Chaka Khan’s vocals to create a narcotic soundscape. The mix opens with a low bass rumble, the way a storm signals its arrival. An uncharacteristically raspy Khan starts wailing. Her vocals bring to mind sounds Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography, music made by enslaved people: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” She roars, “I’m in love,” over and over and over again. The wildness of the repeated phrase suggests madness, but a relatable kind. It makes me think about what, on the surface, seems so irrational: a Black queer person risking alienation from the larger Black community to shape a distinct identity around the inexplicable wants of the heart.Other remixes form narratives. On the “Every Woman’s Beat” remix of Whitney Houston’s 1993 cover of Khan’s signature song, “I’m Every Woman,” the producers David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory use Houston’s vocals to create an impressionistic tale that charts the journey from external desire to inner fulfillment, similar to the theme of “The Wizard of Oz.” At the start of the track, Houston repeats, “anything you want” as if she’s compelled by craving. Then she yells, “I got it,” before proclaiming, “I’m the one.” It feels as if a glittery Glinda had just whispered to her: “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”There is another function of the remixes I cherish most: They instigate precious memories. As James Baldwin wrote: “Music is our witness and our ally. The beat is the confession, which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.” Some remixes remind me of the 1980s and ’90s, when music forged in Black queer spaces began reaching the mainstream. Remixes were one way of preserving Black queer aesthetics amid economic incentives to make club music more commercial.The “FBI Dub” of Janet Jackson’s 1997 hit “Together Again,” by Zanzibar DJ Tony Humphries, takes me back to those days. It’s a reminder of the ferocity of many lost to AIDS. Humphries jackhammers a classic M.F.S.B. groove, breaking it into rhythmic slabs that are the perfect accompaniment to an exquisitely executed pose. It’s house music as hoodoo, conjuring angular apparitions trapped in a fierce dance battle. I listen to these and other remixes from the era to help me cope with a phantom past, the feeling I survived a plague that often seems forgotten. Remixes bring me hope because, by definition, they represent the possibility of change. I’m thinking about a line from Indeep’s 1982 club burner “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/’Cause I can do it in the mix.”Craig Seymour is a music critic and the author of “Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Carrie Mae Weems and George C. Wolfe on Defiance and Claiming Space

      by

      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the “Kitchen Table Series” artist and the theater and film director.George C. Wolfe can pinpoint the exact moment that sparked his career as a director and dramatist. When he was a fourth grader, his all-Black elementary school in Kentucky was preparing for a visit to a nearby white school to mark what was then known as Negro History Week. “We were supposed to sing this song,” recalls Wolfe, 68. “And our principal told us that when we got to a certain line, we should sing it with full conviction because it would shatter all the racism in the room.” To this day, he can remember standing with his classmates singing, “These truths we are declaring, that all men are the same,” and then suddenly belting out, “that liberty’s a torch burning with a steady flame.” “That’s why I’m a storyteller,” he says. “Because someone told me when I was 10 that if I fully committed with my passion and my intelligence and my heart to a line, I could change people.” That belief led him to become both a Broadway powerhouse — a co-writer and the director of the hit musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and the director of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (1993) — and the producer of the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, for which he conceived “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk” (1995). In recent years, he’s devoted more time to making films, including “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020). His latest, “Rustin,” executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and coming to theaters on Nov. 3 and to Netflix two weeks later, tells the story of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist who was instrumental in planning the 1963 March on Washington, helping to recruit his friend Martin Luther King Jr. to take part. But Rustin, who was, in Wolfe’s estimation “about as out as a Black man could be in 1960s America,” was largely pushed aside by civil rights leaders who feared that his sexuality would bring shame on the movement. “Here was this monumental human being who changed history, and then history forgot him,” says Wolfe, himself a gay man, who has lived in New York City since 1979. Telling stories like Rustin’s, he says, is “a means to share, to inform, to challenge, to confront the world.”For the multidisciplinary artist Carrie Mae Weems, 70, those same objectives have influenced more than four decades of photographs, installations and performances exploring themes of class, gender and, most notably, race. The first Black artist to have a retrospective at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum (2014’s “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video”), the Portland, Ore., native who now lives between Brooklyn and Syracuse, N.Y., not only built her reputation as one of America’s most influential photographers but has also elevated fellow artists like Julie Mehretu and Lyle Ashton Harris with her convenings, for which she recruits artists, writers and scholars to come to various institutions for multiday conferences. With works like her “Museum Series” (2006-present) — for which she photographed herself, back to the camera, standing in front of institutions, including the Tate Modern in London and the Pergamon in Berlin — and “Thoughts on Marriage” (1989), which depicts a bride with her mouth taped shut, she has created indelible images of humanity in the face of injustice.Though contemporaries in adjacent disciplines, Wolfe and Weems had never had a real conversation before meeting on a steamy July day in a downtown Manhattan studio. Here, the two discuss their childhoods, art as activism and what they feel is still left to accomplish.Carrie Mae Weems: Let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from, George? George C. Wolfe: I’m from Frankfort, Ky., which was segregated for the first eight years of my life. I went to a grammar school that was part of a Black university, Kentucky State. And I went [to college] there for one year but ran away because I wanted to become another version of myself. I went to Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and then to Los Angeles. At a certain point, it became clear that I needed to leave L.A. [to direct theater], so I came to New York, and that was that. C.M.W.: What made you want to make this new film? G.C.W.: I wanted to explore the brilliance of this organizational mind who put together the March on Washington in seven weeks. It’s about the idea that activism is not a noun or a title; it’s a verb — it’s the doing of. There’s a scene in the film that was inspiring to me, where Bayard [who is played by Colman Domingo] is talking to young kids who’re organizing, and he tells them that every night they should think through every detail and ask themselves what they’re missing, what they haven’t thought about.Colman Domingo (standing) as Bayard Rustin in “Rustin.”David Lee/NetflixC.M.W.: When did you learn about Bayard Rustin? I didn’t know anything about him.G.C.W.: I helped create a museum in Atlanta called the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened nine years ago, so I got into some of these stories that I didn’t know, like Jo Ann Robinson, who was the brain behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her bus seat before Rosa Parks. I became obsessed with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Often, history forgot them.C.M.W.: Yes, so many people! I knew very early on that whatever I did as an artist, I wanted to broaden the field. So I would pick up the phone and call these museums and say, “I love your collection, but I noticed there are actually no women or African Americans. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research in the area, and I’d love to come by and share with you what I have.” And they were like, “Who? What?” I was just 23. But I’d say, “OK, you don’t have any idea who I am, but I do know that this work is important, and I absolutely need you to look at it.”G.C.W.: And what would they say?C.M.W.: “Wellll, OK.” That’s how I became known as a photographer, by doing all that work. I started reading about all these artists when I was a young person, and I made little video projects about people like [the Harlem Renaissance photographer] Roy DeCarava. It was born out of deep curiosity: “Who were those who came before you? Who widened the path? And how do you acknowledge them? And then who’s coming behind you? And how do you broaden the path for them?” In 2014, when I became the first African American to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim, I thought, “This is kind of cool, but it would be really great to have a fabulous convening of a couple of hundred artists and bring all of them to the institution for four or five days and just rock it out.” I continue to do that. I’m doing another one in the fall [at Syracuse University, centered on contested monuments].G.C.W.: I’m obsessed with one aspect of your “Museum Series”: You have your back to us, looking at these buildings, and what it ignites inside of me is, “Are you going to invade it? Are you going to tear it down? Are you going into it, and will it change you? Or will you change it?” Those questions are born out of your proximity to the buildings. If you were farther away, it would say something was keeping you from going in. If you were closer, it would tell the viewer you’d already made the decision to enter. There’s a danger and a possibility of being in the in-between. Carrie Mae Weems’s “Museum Island” (2006-present).© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New YorkC.M.W.: It allows so much for the viewer. I started making those pieces in 2006, and it’s only recently that institutions have begun paying attention to them. Artists are often ahead of the curve in the ways we pose questions; museums are just now arriving at that moment of interrogation. I always think of George Floyd as the straw that broke the camel’s back. His death [in 2020] allowed so much to be brought into focus.G.C.W.: What is your responsibility [when infiltrating] these institutions? It was made very clear to me at a young age that if you come with a certain skill set, it’s your responsibility to invade.C.M.W.: To engage. G.C.W.: For me, it was very specifically invading. Get inside, open up the doors and the windows so that everybody else could come in. C.M.W.: I understand, but I think about it slightly differently. For me, it’s not invasion; it’s claiming of space. It’s really understanding the uniqueness of this voice and what we have to offer — our right to be in that space and to change it by our very presence. I’ve started to think about resistance as an act of love. G.C.W.: And commitment.C.M.W.: And commitment, always. I think this is both our gift and our burden. You’re never just George. You’re always in a group. It’s a part of the condition of being African American in this country. You’re forced by your identity to negotiate the space between who you are, what the group is and what your responsibilities are in relation to both. This has given us, as a people, ingenuity — a level of inventiveness, expansiveness, artistic integrity and a grace that’s truly profound. Without us, this nation would truly suffer. Are you an activist?G.C.W.: I think my work is activism. I do my job with a sense of joy and aggression and defiance.C.M.W.: I was very lucky that I had my father [the owner of a salvage company] and my mother [a seamstress] and my family. My father would say, “Remember that you have a right.” My earliest memories are of that. So that’s given me a sense of confidence, that I just feel very comfortable in the world, wherever I am. I love knowing about other cultures, but our quest to be human is what interests me. I think we are still crawling toward our humanity. We haven’t arrived yet.G.C.W.: My theory is that everything is a muscle. Love is a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies. And curiosity is one of the most important muscles, curiosity about the world and about others. My first memory was of George Wolfe, whom I’m named after, my grandfather [a carpenter]. He would build a big tower of blocks and then I would knock them down and he would applaud. Defiance! C.M.W.: At this stage, my concerns are more focused on the spiritual dimensions of my life. I made a small performance piece called “Grace Notes: Reflections for Now” [for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C.] after the 2015 killings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. At the funeral of one of the victims, [President] Obama came to the stage, spoke for a while — and then, finally, the only thing he could do was sing “Amazing Grace.” He had to go to a spiritual place in order to deal with the tragedy of that event.Over the past few years, I’ve collected over 400 photographs of primarily Black men who’ve been killed in the United States since around 2000. I’m chronicling this history of violence. There are days when I have to leave the studio early because I’ve been looking at murder all day. Ultimately, artists deal with similar ideas over and over during the course of a lifetime, so there’s a set of primary ideas that you’re always coming back to. For instance, I produced [an installation and performance] piece called “The Shape of Things” (2021), which looks at the circus of politics and the rise of Trumpism, and the extraordinary violence that has been inflicted on people of color as the country moves from white to Black and varying shades of brown. But even though you’re looking at tragedy, the real work is to find where hope resides within that tragedy.G.C.W.: This country is at its most interesting when people cross borders. The culture that phenomenon creates is astonishing. So the stories of my family are driving me now: the monumental, ordinary, astonishing, brilliant people who said, “The border that you’ve crafted doesn’t serve my definition of myself, so let me go charging through it.” That’s what Bayard did. It’s what our ancestors did. They said, “I’m bigger than your definition of me.”C.M.W.: I decided there’s a part of what I’m doing that needs to be done out of my human ingenuity, but I’m not interested in persuading anybody about anything. The work has within it all kinds of questions, but the way in which the vast majority of America views me? I couldn’t care less. I just want to get this work done.This interview has been edited and condensed.Hair: Kiyonori Sudo. Makeup: Linda Gradin More