Comma--short breath
Period--full breath

Pencil in pauses

Underline

Use musical notations for lists. Vary pacing and pitch, emotional coloring.

Today at 9 p.m. CST (my time!) for 60 minutes check out:

The Singing Office
Animal Shelter vs. School Bus Drivers

Joey Fatone (N'SYNC) and Mel B. (Spice Girls) are on a fun mission to discover hidden talent in workplaces across America. Mel B. is searching at the SPCALA while Joey scours the Pupil Transportation Cooperative.

Annemieke Farrow, daughter of my New Mexico long time friends Stephanie and John Farrow, makes her TV debut on this show, and we'll all be glued as if it were the Oscars.

I've known Annemieke since she was a baby. She's made a brave 180 degree turn in her life moving from 1) a Broadway musical career of dancing and singing and acting in musicals and Shakespeare...playing Reporter #2 in Spider-Man 2...to....training dogs; and 2) from NYC to LA; and 3) from long hair to short hair, as I recall first seeing her.

Now that's what I call a PORTABLE PORTFOLIO!

Such a capacity for change and strength with flexibility leaves me applauding in the aisles with the popcorn sliding off my lap. You can be sure I'll be there tonight, and I hope you'll join me along with millions of other viewers.

2) I've also learned that St. Louis is still, sadly, one of the most culturally segregated cities in the world. I'm not quite sure why. I raise this as a topic for conversation with new friends now and again. They all agree with me and advance theories. Thus it is that there are White Events and Black Events with token members of the other group there almost as diplomatic delegates, but all too few. It shocked me when I first arrived, because in all my years in Oakland, California, when I went to a cultural event...everyone was there, talking to each other...mixing and mingling. Thus is was again at this gathering consisting of both younger and older African Americans, with an emphasis on the older crowd.

3) I've also learned that costuming is of the essence in going out. The Dick Gregory event, falling as it did on the cusp of work life and night life, was a mix of work attire and more riveting styles...regal, from West Africa.

4) Another thing I've learned about St. Louis events is that There Will Be Food...and, the food will always exceed my expectations. Thus it was as we were well nourished before the show and well cared for during the show.

5) I've learned that the Cost of Living Index is quite modest here. $25 bought me a seat at a VIP table and, as I said, a fabulous banquet, as I readied for The Gregory Show.

Dick Gregory

Dick Gregory recently stole the stage at Tavis Smiley's 2008 State of the Black Union event is returning home to help us celebrate Juneteenth by discussing what's going on in the world today in his own satirical way.

Snacks and drinks will be available from 5-7 p.m. to start off an evening that promises to be both hysterical and informative. Only $15/person or $25 for a VIP table. Everything is cabaret style seating.

Show begins at 7:45 p.m.

Contact me if you live in St. Louis and want to sit with me at our V.I.P. table with some of the coolest people around.

Ruth describes herself as "a poet impersonating a novelist...an editor and workshop coordinator." Ruth-Miriam Garnett is the author of Laelia (Simon &Schuster/Atria) which I felt so fortunate to find in the stacks of my favorite bookstore in Godfrey, Illinois and further fortunate to have her sign it. Ruth has also written A Move Further South (Third World Press). She has recently completed a new novel, Chloe's Grief and a new collection of poems, Concerning Violence.

Ruth and I enjoyed such a wonderful evening at the Black Rep's staging of Djanet's Sears' "Harlem Duet," (ends May 18th!) and Ruth, as the Harvard grad she is, stuns me continually with her level of conversation, I implored her to write a review of the production and she graciously agreed.---JGR
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The St. Louis Black Rep's staging of Canadian playwright Djanet Sears' award-winning Harlem Duet made for an evening of theater at once enthralling and tense. The play raises enormous questions of power dynamics occurring in inter and intra-racial romantic liaisons spanning equally fraught historical contexts---the slave era, the early 20th century and a recent era substantially accommodating as well as frustrating the personal and professional aspirations of the two African American principal characters.

The female lead, Billie, and the male Othello, her husband, navigate the waters of love, betrayal, social identity and personal affinity in a story initially utilizing a thread from Shakespeare’s tragedy, then following its own equally weighted course. The chief value of this work is in effect the weight provided by Sears’ wrenching examination and expose of these character’s vulnerabilities and suffering. The high volume sensibilities portrayed ensure a certain clarity when viewing albeit mixed motives.

Othello’s abandonment of Billie for a white coworker is construed as his ticket to whiteness, read success as a Columbia University professor. Billie’s resulting disintegration is raised throughout, beginning with her turn as a slavewoman ready and willing to flee, only to learn that her mate’s loyalty and reciprocated love for their white mistress engender his decision to remain in the South. A similar disillusionment, as this scenario is revisited in the 1920’s, carries Billie along a murderous current.

In the contemporary scene, both characters survive, however, Bilie’s psyche is ravaged to the point of near disintegration and her life après Othello’s abandonment continues in a mental facility. The question becomes, is love this destructive an ideal worth upholding, let alone seeking, even if deemed to be an overwhelmingly common occurrence?

Other questions remain. Chief among these: Is Othello’s self-deification his own emotional construct, or is his infallible desirability a result of Bille’s self-negating projection? Think again, or at the very least, take a deep breath.

The leads---Cherita Armstrong (Billie) and Kingsley Leggs (Othello) are both believable and textured in this well crafted production.

Reception and dinner at the Spiering Room at the Sheldon Concert Hall launched a memorable evening. We walked over to the Fabulous Fox where we entered a VIP stage door and slipped into our good seats. The performance began with a retrospective film of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (founded by Alvin Ailey and then turned over to Judith Jamison as artistic director and Masazumi Chaya as associate artistic director).

Then, ah! the performance of: Firebird (1970), The Golden Section (1983), and Revelations (1960). Revelations [watch video here] is considered to be Ailey's signature piece, and consists of these three movements: Pilgrim of Sorrow, Take Me to the Water, and Move, Members, Move.

Michael Uthoff, artistic and executive director of Dance St. Louis (housed at the Centene Center for Arts & Education) hosted the evening.

The champagne dessert reception with dancing to the Ralph Butler Band capped the evening. For me, the highlight was sharing the parquet floor with a four-year-old nymph who pirouetted as I taught her how to go in and out of "the basket" in the jitterbug move. What fun!

Joel weaves in music with the history of struggle and mining of spirit in the African American male experience throughout our history as a nation. His chameleon-changes of costume, speech, and point of view are fluid and poignant.

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JOEL P. E. KING, a 26-year-old native of East Saint Louis, performs in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. Joel performed in the gospel touring show "A House Divided" where Tyler Perry complimented him on a "job well done". In the film "Pieces of a Dream" Joel will star as a young leading actor, Chris.

In addition to perfoming, Joel has been writing since he was twelve, and aims at work that heals and reveals. Joel wrote, produced, and directed "A Mother's Cry" and "Real Life." He is developing a television series "Through the Eyes" based on a true story.

HOMEWORK LINKS
1) Hear Soyinka's rolling baritone, relaxed, just chatting, sharing wisdom
First, let me give you a link to a 1998 conversation between Harry Kreisler and Wole Soyinka that took place in Berkeley, California as part of the "Conversations with History" series. What is said is still fresh today, AND you'll get to hear his richly nuanced voice. You can also go over to the Wole Soyinka page there and generally have a grand time.

2) Review of "Death and the King's Horseman"
Also, please read Paul Friswold's review "Honor System: The Black Rep impressively mounts Death and the King's Horseman."
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Flyer for Soyinka's Black Rep appearance

ANTICIPATION! GETTING READY FOR SOYINKA'S TALK

When Natalie Johnson (The Black Rep's Director of Marketing) told me that Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in literature, was coming to St. Louis, I hugged her and did a victory dance, right there in the lobby of the Grandel Theatre. Because I'd taught his work as part of the exam curriculum in both Ghana and Botswana, I was thrilled to think I could meet him in my lifetime.

When I found out there was a two-day Soyinka Symposia at SIU, Carbondale, I signed up and went. You can see these archived posts in AH, AFRICA! category. That symposia was over the sky amazing. Yes, I did meet Soyinka and shook his (dare I say it?) papery hand before he signed his latest memoir "You Must Set Forth At Dawn." (See post on under Read On category.) In addition to being brainy and wickedly funny, he's a gracious man who (my father's term) is "solid."

Wole Soyinka's memoir "You Must Set Forth At Dawn"

From the fulsome and heartfilled Carbondale Soyinka Symposia, I'd dashed back to Grandel Theatre (3610 Grandel Square, 314-534-3810, theblackrep.org) where the informal discussion presented by the St. Louis Black Repertory Company and Washington University's performing arts and African and African-American studies departments had been moved up two hours. Robert Henke, chairman of the performing arts department was to moderate the discussion with poet, novelist, critic, dramatist, and activist Soyinka.

WAITING AT THE GRANDEL

Distinguished linguist John Baugh and Professor Robert Henke chatted with us as we awaited Wole Soyinkas' arrival. Soyinka was in transit from the Carbondale, Illinois conference to the stage at the Grandel Theatre. From thence he would be whisked away to the St. Louis airport.

Henke gave us some background to appreciate what we were about to experience by telling us more about Soyinka life and the "fertile mythology he uses as a basis for tragic situation". Baugh honored Ron Himes, founder of the Black Rep, as an artistic genius and icon.

An impressive gathering turned out to be with Soyinka on this morning. Rudy Nickens (executive director of the Black Rep) Eugene B. Redmond (poet laureate of East St. Louis),
Poet and founding father of River Styx Michael Castro, Civil Rights icon Dovetta Wilson (who died this April at 73), and Chris King (editorial director for the St. Louis-American)...among other luminaries.

We stood when Soyinka made his (unintentionally) dramatic entrance...like the guest of honor arriving late at a dinner party.

Here, then, is my extremely loose transcript of this historical conversation.

Professor Henke: Tell us about the context for "The Lion and The Jewel" (1958) and the epic "Dance of the Forest." It's an interesting yoking.

Soyinka: "Lion and the Jewel" had a ludicrous stimulous. It owes its birth to Charlie Chaplan, one of my favorite comedians. He had just married Oona O'Niel, a much younger woman. I thought, aha, these Europeans do as our chiefs do at home. They take young wives just like our tradition of marriage at home. This subtle dialogue of culture is never completely expressed in the play.

Henke: What makes a civilization great?

Soyinka: In my youth we were not only fierce nationalist, but we were combatants. we were going to liberate all of Africa...from Colonial to independent status. Civilization is built on cruelties. We were not free of this burden of negative history...the exoriating history of Imperialism. I believed in possibility.

Henke: Is the school teacher in "The Lion and The Jewel" related in some way to the typology we see in Comedia del Arte?

Soyinka: [Whose father was a schoolteacher] He's placed in the schoool context to represent education and literacy in the play. The school teacher's idea of culture is ballroom dancing, sipping tea, and abandoning traditional foods. "The Lion and the Jewel" is a simple straight-forward story in favor of the cunning of tradition.

Henke: Have you been influenced by poetic dramatist such as Senge and Shakespeare? Could you speak to the link between poetry and drama?

Soyinka: I come from a densely poetic culture. Even hawking criers in the street permeates the poetic surroundings outside my mother's shop. Mythology inn Yoruba society is very much alive and rendered in poetic language of provers and riddles with which everyday language is laced.

Poetry is all around in African life. You hear it in Mammy Wagons. [We called these always-crowded converted Bedford trucks "Tro-Tros" in Ghana.] There's a concision, music, and startling matrices.

[I couldn't catch the onomatapoetic word he used which means "get down," so, I asked Nigerian poet Obinna Nwakanma for help. Perhaps he was talking about the "Bolekaja"? A sort of engaged polemical poetics made famous by the critics Chinweizu et al, in their critique of the writings of Soyinka's generation of poets including Okigbo and J.P Clark. It comes from the image of the "Tro-tro" or the "kia-kia" buses and of street lore.

Henke: Diction includes a range of registers.

Soyinka: Yoruba people don't believe in corrupting English when a new object comes into the culture. For example, the word for grammaphone means "eagle speaks without a fair reply."

Henke: Detailed stage directions for the dances?

Soyinka: The play comes to me visually, not conceptually, so I'm not thinking about thwarted love or writing dialogue to add adornments.

Henke: Sound is important. The drums.

Soyinka: As I see an actor on the stage, I hear what they'd hear. But dramaturgy has some artificial construction.

Henke: Spaces. Variety of staging. Different from Africa.

Soyinka: Theatre is where it happens, as it happens. TIn Africa, theatre happens in the streets, in the market square, at the chief's palace, on market day. he sense of space is very fluid!

In the West you slice spacial allowance...almost cinematically if you like.

Henke: "Death and the King's Horseman" is one of the greatest plays of our age.

Soyinka: Its stimulus was European. What evoked it was history. I saw a bust of Winston Churchhill, the British Bulldog at Cambridge King's College. Churchill was the symbol of the British Empire. I had an overwhelming desire to give it a push. I resisted, anyway. These are the people who took over entire cultures and got away with it. I locked myself in an apartment for about four days and wrote it.

Henke: Clash of cultures?

Soyinka: "Clash of cultures" was a buzz word of the times. For example, Achebe's work was described that way, but it is so much more. I wanted to warn readers and veiwers to look deeper. It was factual first, with the historical event triggering it. But one does not necessarily follow all the details literally in translating history into a work of art.

Henke: You've seen many productions of "Death and the King's Horseman." How have they differed over time?

Soyinka: I've seen perhaps seven productios. I never tire of college productions. It's the professional productions I'm most scared of.

Henke: Influenced by everything you ever read?

Soyinka: All human beings become part of what they eat, taste, smell. We are influenced by music, architecture, painting, and dance. It's inevitable that from time to time traces of what one has consumed will creep into one's creative production.

Senge? Irish culture and music are closer to Yoruba. Joan Littlewood said, "At last I've met the Black Irish."

[I think about this time, questions came from the audience.]

Question: Colonialism? Wars?

Soyinka: We must transcend and express our collective national will, resources, and responsibilities. We cannot blame outsiders for recruiting child soldiers. We must accept failure of nerve and lack of vision...and learn. we must take our own humanity as a prime responsibility for independence.

Question: African writers?

Soyinka: If you Google under "African Literature" [big laugh] so many will come up.

Question: Incarceration and forced exile...how affected?

Soyinka: I like to think...not at all! It provided a different rhythm of working. My activities in exile...I've never been a passive exile. I consider it a five-year political sabbatical. I always worked with others to overthrow the root of the reason for my exile.

Question: We're all Africans....?

Soyinka:These definitions and divisions came later. I never take these latest discoveries as final. I don't like to be final. I just take the latest assessment as that. But, I do know that humanity IS one...SHOULD BE...one. It's good to retain that philosophy. That's logical for me.

Question: Drumming in mythology? Censorship?

Soyinka: Traditional modes of expression. We like to think Yoruba's invented Talking Drums. Their 1.5 octaves imitate the human voice with great accuracy. Drumming is a tool of expression as versatile as human speech, used in ceremony and ritual. When you combine drumming and dirging, you get harmonics and it takes people under...into trance. I had to choreograph a scene to get the actors most vulnerable to trance off the stage. At the JFK and Lincoln Center it was remarkable and sometimes frightening to see how it affected the audience.

Question: Censorship?

Soyinka: It's difficult to shut a Nigerian up. Censorship is not a very successful business in Nigeria.

Question: William Shakespeare?

Soyinka: I do not believe that William Shakespeare can be over-rated. The man is just a genius.

Question: Conflation of identities: African/Nigerian/Yoruba?

Soyinka: Everyone has several identities. We can even reduce it to "What passport do you carry?" Some people believe in national identity. Some in the Pan-Africanist identity of The Diaspora. These are all intersecting circles. This for me is quite rich. We should all honor our multiple identities wherever we find them.

African-Americans still have to work at entering African culture when staging my plays. There is no intuitive cultural visa.

Question: Commonweath literature?

Soyinka: I resented having my work stamped with the label of "Commonwealth Literature." I felt it stamped me as a vessel of Colonialism in a strange way and made my squirm. But, you leave it aside and do what you have to do, which is to create.

Question: African diaspora?

Soyinka: Lost out somewhere. Gained somewhere.

Question: What are you working on now?

Soyinka: I never answer that question.

Question: [about Nigerian politics]

Soyinka: An example of failed leadership. When you betray a people, you lose my respect. He chose to turn his rule into one of the worst kind and it's tragic. That's why the fight cropped up all the time.

Question: Collaborate with sister at University of Kansas?

Soyinka: I try not to disturb her.

Then Ron Himes whisked Wole Soyinka off to the airport, world citizen that he is. Out in the lobby I huddled with two other women of letters--- Lavelle Wilkins-Chinn and Ruth Miriam Garnett as we collected ourselves from being transported into Soyinka's orbit...and went off for a bite to eat for re-fortify our bodies as well as our souls.

The Washington University Performing Arts Department describes the dance-drama cum social satire like this:Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate for literature, wrote several light-hearted plays that examine political ideas about colonization, culture, and gender roles . . . and often makes fun of Westernized school teachers. In The Lion and the Jewel, Lukunle, the teacher, tries to woo Sidi, the Jewel, by belittling her and trying to convince her to adhere to modern ways. Meanwhile, Baroka, the tribe's chief, decides that Sidi would make an excellent addition to his already large collection of wives and concubines. In a carnival of dance and song, Sidi must find her destiny somewhere between the old and the new, between the modern and the traditional in this comedy of the human condition.

Poetry, drumming (Grandmaster percussionist Arthur Moore II remains on-stage throughout the 90-minute performance),dance, mime, masks, tableaux, and women's chorus merge with outstanding acting to provide a delightful evening of theater and powerful storytelling. The modernist-traditionalist debate central to development in Africa is nowhere played out more starkly than in Soyinka's two tales of the Nigerian village presented in St. Louis this Spring (with "Death and the King's Horseman" being the other.)

"Lion and the Jewel" is an extended dancepiece that is intricately choreographed by Keith Tyrone; the play remains in constant, telling motion. I loved the physical bits of stage business. I sat close enough to see the actors' foreheads beaded with sweat from their intense effort. There is, by the way, equal-opportunity beefcake and cheesecake as handsome bodies of both sexes are displayed at their best advantage, with skin not just peeking out, but proudly there.

Jimmy Ganasin Brooks Jr. who plays Lakunle, the school teacher totally slayed me with his mastery of comedic timing and understanding of physical comedy as more than slapstick. He's something like a young Chalin or Keaton in the way he can move from a rubber-kneed awkward dance that covers the stage to absurdist riffs of dialogue of the moderist to the depths of pathos.

The supporting stagecraft is, as usual in a Himes production, minimally elegant and effective. I loved the sun/moon globes behind the scrim, the trees that flew up and down on wires, the use of silhouette, and great props like the faux zebra skin on the chief's bed.

Listen folks, if you're in the St. Louis area and reading this...do yourself a favor and run buy yourself a ticket for one of the remaining performances.

"The Goddess of Heaven and Earth descends to visit her sister, Queen of the Underworld, while a present-day woman finds herself in nightmare. In these twin journeys, the mundane and the mythic merge in a struggle toward resurrection. The theme is the destruction and rebirth of the Divine Feminine, its impact on our inner quest as well as its implications for global survival.

The Independent Eye, now in its 34th season as a national touring ensemble, premieres this first production of its "Mythic Kitchen" series.