A comment on the state of People of Color in the Arts
Commentary by Chitown Kev
There are two stories in the world of race relations and show business that, while different in many respects, hit upon a theme that I’ve been thinking of for months.
One issue involves the resignation of Tony Award-winning actress Tonya Pinkins from the Classic Stage Company’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s classic play Mother Courage and Her Children generally because of creative differences with director Brian Kulick and, more specifically, because of Ms. Pinkins concerns over the portrayal of black characters on the stage.
When Black bodies are on the stage, Black perspectives must be reflected. This is not simply a matter of "artistic interpretation"; race and sex play a pivotal role in determining who holds the power to shape representation. A Black female should have a say in the presentation of a Black female on stage
CSC's truncated version (an hour has been cut) eliminates Mother Courage and her children's backstory, the use of her cart, and much of Brecht's brilliant commentary on war. Mother Courage is the King Lear in the classical cannon of female roles. Not since Caroline, or Change, ten years ago, have I had a role of this caliber. How do I walk away from what could be one of the greatest roles in my career? I couldn't, until all my research, arguing and pleading for my character's full realization fell on deaf ears. And then I had to.
Brecht's drama follows Mother Courage, a women who supports herself and her children by selling goods to warring armies from a cart she drags through the battle zones. Along the way, all three of her children are killed because of the war. Mother Courage is the epitome of every poor, undocumented, battered, trafficked and immigrant women hustling to provide for her family however she must.
The more I read of the various issues surrounding CSC’s production of Brecht’s play, the more complex it gets. For example, director Brian Kulick:
I had a basic question that I started this process with: Can you treat a Brecht play like we now treat a Shakespeare play? In other words, is a Brecht play as open as a Shakespeare text where you can set it in another time and place and see how the play speaks through the lens of that new setting? It seemed like the most direct analogy for a play like Mother Courage would be to set it in Central Africa in this century. The next question became could you keep the Brecht text as it is and make a transplantation without too much interference with the adaptation? What would it tell us? This added another layer of experience to watching Mother Courage. The result, for me, is that the play becomes haunted by three powerful ghosts: the ghost of the Thirty Years War (where the original version is set), the ghost of the Second World War (that prompted Brecht to write the play) and the ghost of what is still happening in the Congo today. These cumulative hauntings began to say something about war with a capital "W." It also allowed us to use the production as a way of reminding audiences that even though the plight of the Congo does not occupy the front pages of our newspapers, it is an on-going conflict that is still far from over and can use our attention and support.
As Tonya and I worked on the production the question became how specific does one have to become to evoke the Congo? Do we need place names, do we need to rewrite narration to make this leap or can it live in the realm of images, music and the given circumstances of the actors? I gravitated toward what I would call a more "open" approach, Tonya was longing for specifics. As we kept working on the play, this question and how to answer it became louder and louder to each of us to a point where I think we couldn't hear each other anymore.
Actor/director clashes in stage and film productions are, of course, pretty common, as this post at The Director’s Vision blog shows. There’s even a firestorm over the new translation of Brecht’s play commissioned for this production.
And, of course, there’s the attempt of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage to do an adaptation of Mother Courage set in the Congo; an attempt which culminated in Ms. Nottage’s award-wining play, Ruined.
Ruined, which opens at the Almeida next week, was originally intended as an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage by way of Congo. In transporting the action of Brecht's play, set around the Thirty Years' War in 17th-century Europe, to 21st-century Africa, Nottage wanted to expose the horrors endured in a country ravaged by war – and especially by women. But she hit a problem.
"There was an absence of information," she says. "You could find information about the conflict, but not its impact on women and girls." Nottage travelled to east Africa in 2004 with director Kate Whoriskey. The pair spent two weeks interviewing a number of Congolese women refugees in Uganda; they had fled their country during the second Congo war between 1998 and 2003. Nottage returned the following year, using a Guggenheim grant to travel around and interview refugees fleeing armed conflicts in Uganda, Sudan, Congo and Somalia. In 2007, she received the MacArthur "genuis" grant for $500,000.
"Almost all the women I interviewed had been sexually abused and assaulted in horrific ways," Nottage says. As she amassed their accounts, she felt Brecht's template slipping away. "[The women's] stories were so specific to Africa, and to that conflict, that the play had to be about them. I didn't need Mother Courage in the end. Theirs was the story that wasn't being told."
For the time being, I want to leave the story of CSC’s production of Mother Courage and talk about the controversy regarding the Academy Award nominations.
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The other story involves yet another year of a lack of racial diversity within the film industry, as reflected in the recent Academy Awards nominations. One specific issue as it relates to the Oscars is the lack of diversity among the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From Doctor RJ’s post last night:
There are more than 6,000 voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The rules for membership are a bit convoluted, but it basically consists of people working in the industry who are either sponsored by two Academy members, or by those who've been nominated or won Academy Awards. The demographics of the Academy are not public knowledge, and the organization refuses to release any data about its members. But 2012 and 2013 analyses by the Los Angeles Times found the demographics to be about what you would expect if one attended a tea party meeting.
- 94 percent white
- 76 percent male
- An average age of 63 years old
- Of the Academy’s different branches, the producers are 98 percent white, the writers are 98 percent white, and the actors are 88 percent white
~~~~~~
The story behind the Oscar nominations is as simple as the story behind the Classic Stage Company’s production of Mother Courage is complex but the issues of race, representation, artistic practice, and artistic criticism are very similar and it is a topic that I have been mulling over for some years now.
Demographic trends show that America is becoming an increasingly more racially diverse society and that racial diversity will affect everything from politics to whom we love to high and low culture.
As that happens, people of color will increasingly be the producers of literature, art, theater, movies, popular music, and even the “higher forms” of these arts (i.e. classical music and opera, independent and artsy films).
As it stands now, so much of the literary/art criticism field that appears in the daily newspapers, magazines, and, now, on “mainstream” internet blogs seems to be very, very white.
There are exceptions, of course (e.g. Darryl Pickney at The New York Review of Books, Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times...books are really my subject, so those were the first two names off the top of my head). But the idea of the dominant white class continuing to pass artistic judgment over the work of an increasingly racially diverse art world simply isn’t going to fly.
And yes, that should also mean that an increasingly racially diverse class of literary, art, and music critics should (and will, I think) pass judgment on all the arts, in whatever form the arts of the present and the future take on. And while people of color may generally see things in certain cultural productions that white people don’t, that should in no way demean the quality or the standards of the criticism.
Everyone simply has to learn to adjust.
So, for example, Ms. Pinkins may have a point regarding her interpretation of one of the all-time female characters in theatre history; Bertolt Brecht himself acknowledged that there were multiple ways to play the character Mother Courage. But I think that the character that Ms. Pinkins wanted to play, “an icon of feminine tenacity and strength” and “a Black female's fearless capabilities” is a wonderful character to play on the stage but is not Mother Courage; indeed, icons and heroes and heroines are in short supply in what I’ve studied of Brechtian theater (Galileo might be an exception) and really, quite beside the point.
What is not beside the point, though, is the need for cultural productions and cultural criticism that reflects the needs, wants, and desires of various communities. In fact, they are needed now more than ever.
As the polls in Iowa narrow and Mr. Sanders maintains a lead in New Hampshire, both candidates have shifted attention and resources to South Carolina, which has emerged as a crucial battleground should Mrs. Clinton lose the first two nominating contests. New York Times: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Turn Focus to South Carolina, Courting Black Leaders.
Senator Bernie Sanders talked about the “seemingly endless stream of tragedies” in black communities from clashes with the police, while Hillary Clinton sought to closely align herself to President Obama, as the two Democratic candidates worked to woo black leaders ahead of this state’s Feb. 27 primary contest.
In his address at a gala dinner hosted by the South Carolina Democratic Party on Saturday night, Mr. Sanders talked about attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and tried to tie the theme of Dr. King’s speech to his economic message of ending inequality.
“Our job is not just to honor the life and work of Dr. King,” Mr. Sanders said. “That march on Washington was for jobs and freedom.”
Mrs. Clinton, who spoke after Mr. Sanders, leaned heavily on Mr. Obama’s legacy and popularity here, vowing to continue the progress he has made on health care, gun control and overhauling the criminal justice system. “He does not get the credit he deserves for saving the American economy,” she said, to a roar of applause.
As the polls in Iowa narrow and Mr. Sanders maintains a lead in New Hampshire, both candidates have shifted attention and resources to South Carolina, which has emerged as a crucial battleground should Mrs. Clinton lose the first two nominating contests.
Many have laid claim to the civil rights legend, obscuring the radicalism of his message. The New Republic: Martin Luther King, Jr. Doesn’t Belong to You.
A young person coming of age in the last few generations, particularly if she or he is black, may have seen more images of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than anyone, even if we count depictions of Jesus Christ. They would have seen his image adorning cheaply framed portraits above a mantle or the old church calendars that hung in a grandmother’s kitchen, browning from age as they stayed affixed to the refrigerator long past December due to pride. (You see the same thing happening to a lot of Obama photos in black homes today.)
King’s soft, fleshy face, either painted with a celestial glow or photographed in black and white, was often depicted looking off into the distance as if in reflection or mourning. We’d see that face move in familiar footage that typically went into heavy rotation right around this time of year, especially with the inevitable broadcast of his 1963 speech at the March on Washington. We’d sit rapt, our voices exhausted by the singing of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and “We Shall Overcome” at our church commemorations, and we’d listen. Hearing about his dream again would be as if we were taking up a New Year’s resolution anew every January to end racism. Once the commemoration of his birthday was first observed as a holiday, King not only became more image than man. He became ritualized.
The same as Jesus, King is often celebrated incompletely. Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, speaking Sunday at the WNYC MLK Day event at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, referred to those who might “empty his radical witness.” Even as contemporary historians and artists such as Michael Eric Dyson and Ava DuVernay have offered fuller pictures of King the human being in recent years, our nation’s Eurocentric historical narratives continue to do their work to a man who was, in his time, one of the foremost threats to structural racism and inequality. Our rituals, while comforting and inspiring, lulled the American public into a lionization of a complicated man whose advocacy for economic justice and labor—and against war—are not always part of the story. As long as King’s radicalism stays missing from our remembrances, it will be easier for people to lay claim to his story—even people who oppose everything King actually stood for.
One group of young leaders used this holiday weekend to adopt the King tradition in full. The Black Youth Project 100, a Chicago-based movement collective that trains and mobilizes activists between the ages of 18 and 35, staged #ReclaimMLK actions in several cities. The protests, per BYP100 digital strategist Fresco Steeze, aimed to “build a narrative that when we want to celebrate radical history, movement history, we don’t have to have this cookie-cutter narrative that America wants us to have for our black movement leaders. We can celebrate the fact that they fought.” The actions, Steeze said, were also in coordination with the forthcoming release of their new Agenda to Build Black Futures, an economic-justice document advocating for reparations, worker’s rights, divestment from policing and prisons, and workplace protections for women and trans employees.
The genetics testing company 23andME is looking for vounteers to join a study on how genes may affect the risk for Crohns Disease and other bowel diseases. The Root: A Call For African Americans to Join a Study on Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
Scientists recognize that a person’s gender and ancestry play a large role in determining risk for certain diseases. For instance, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), including both Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, and a recent study suggests 36% of those are African American - and the number of diagnosed African Americans continues to rise.
There is very little those diagnosed with IBD can do and often, surgery is the only treatment available.
23andMe, a genetics testing company, is approaching IBD research in a new way. They are conducting an online study to understand how genes may influence IBD risk, progression and drug response. While over a third of those diagnosed with IBD are African American, African Americans currently represent less than 2% of 23andMe’s study population. African Americans are a critical demographic for understanding IBD, so 23andMe is interested in fixing this under-representation. They hope more African Americans with IBD will join the study.
Um.. yeah folks slavery was bad. Even if you want to celebrate our founding fathers they engaged in human trafficking and involuntary servitude, sorry you just have to accept that. Slate: Publisher Pulls George Washington Kids Book for Upbeat Portrayal of Slavery.
Everyone is buzzing about the president's birthday! Especially George Washington's servants, who scurry around the kitchen preparing to make this the best celebration ever. Oh, how George Washington loves his cake! And, oh, how he depends on Hercules, his head chef, to make it for him. Hercules, a slave, takes great pride in baking the president's cake. But this year there is one problem—they are out of sugar.
Scholastic said in a statement “the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves.” A long feature in the trade publication Kirkus, ahead of the book’s Jan. 5th publication, dissected its glaring flaws, labeling it an “incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery.” The reviews from the public have been even more scathing; the picture book has been absolutely pummeled with negative reviews on Amazon.
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.
Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?"
Indeed, it is a question that is still shouted to high heaven today.
I
honey people murder mercy U.S.A. the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit from being born
America
tomorrow yesterday rip rape exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime terrorizing
death by men by more than you or I can
STOP
II
They sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious like shorewashed shells
we share an afternoon of mourning in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and more
-- June Jordan "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr."