Countdown New Year’s Eve with ONE, a work by Anne Imhof incorporating footage from her 2019 Tate Modern show.
And start 2021 with a short performance by Patti Smith. Both will screen in London in PiccadillyCircus and stream worldwide on the Circa YouTube channel.
Letter by director George C. Wolfe, on the occasion of the Netflix release of his film MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, based on August Wilson’s play.
In the blues song Michigan Water, jazz great Jelly Roll Morton seductively croons:
Michigan Water taste like sherry wine, mean sherry wine Mississippi Water taste like turpentine
For the over 100,000 Black people who migrated to Chicago from the Deep South during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, the waters of Lake Michigan must have felt intoxicating indeed. But as Jelly Roll warned, those waters turned brutally mean the summer of 1919, when a 17-year-old Black boy went swimming and inadvertently crossed an invisible line of racial demarcation. He was attacked and drowned.
When no arrests were made for the young boy’s death, Black people took to the street in protest. During the ensuing confrontations, a white mob stormed Bronzeville, Chicago’s Black neighborhood. Five days later, thirty-seven were dead, 536 injured, and over a thousand left homeless.
The film MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM is set during the summer of 1927. As the same racial embers which erupted eight years earlier continue to simmer, enter a different kind of explosion, but no less stinging or socially significant. Enter singer-songwriter-showbiz entrepreneur, the legendary Ma Rainey, a Black woman from Columbus, Georgia, who is used to obeying nobody’s rules but her own.
Rainey, aka “The Mother of the Blues,” has come north for a one-day recording session. Included in her entourage is her nephew Sylvester, her newest girlfriend Dussie Mae, and band members Toledo, Slow Drag, Cutler and Levee.
Ma Rainey, as crafted by playwright August Wilson, breaks a number of rules, including those of Wilson himself. She is the only character in August’s magnificent ten play cycle chronicling the African American existence during the twentieth century who is based on a real person. She is also the only LGBTQ character, as was Ma, an out lesbian who in her song “Prove It On Me,” unabashedly proclaims—
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends Must have been women cause I don’t like men.
Equally unique about the play, which premiered on Broadway in 1984, is that it’s the only play in the cycle which is not set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the famed black neighborhood where Wilson spent his formative years.
But the one quality the piece shares with the rest of his work is its stunning language; language which is as exalted as it is visceral and raw.
As the characters in MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM sermonize, philosophize, talk shit, confront and condemn, their cascading words become a symphonic composition which celebrates the pain, joy and wonder of being Black, human and alive.
In as much as Ma Rainey, the historical figure, was a trailblazer, by 1927 the world was starting to leave her behind. Bessie Smith, Ma’s protege and alleged former lover, had eclipsed her in record sales and popularity. And each week the Duke Ellington Orchestra could be heard on the radio, live from The Cotton Club; the modernity of Ellington’s harmonics, the polar opposite of Ma Rainey and her jug band blues.
Levee, Ma’s cornet player, who has his own musical sound and vision of the future, sees his time in Chicago as a chance to break free of the strictures which have kept Black performers/artists from having the creative careers they deserve.
Will Levee have a future full of promise and possibility, or will the demons of his past and ours as a country keep him and us from moving forward, unencumbered and free?
The blues as an art form has always struck me as having the power to transform the paradoxical (faith vs despair, anguish vs desire) into a balm for the hopeful heart. Or to quote Ma Rainey:
“The blues helps you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world. Something’s been added by that song.”*
This year, the CalArts Winter Dance—presented with Redcat—will be online, “an immersive, digital performance… synthesizing the embodied memories of the faculty and students… charting [their] personal and shared histories with fresh insights through cutting-edge cartographies, [imagining] new dances in new forms through new technologies”*
Maybe within the museum dance can have another rhythm, temporality, be made more elusive. Dance could then escape the heavily prescribed regime often found in theaters, with concise beginnings and ends and a required length. Here then it could even be made “ghostly.”
Even then, I can attest to my general feelings of unease with the weight of History and the collecting of objects within the museological frame. This unease also bears on questions of site/sight as it pertains to the museum as space for viewing dance and performance. I have become increasingly more comfortable and, let’s say, provoked by the role of seeing and being seen by an audience. This relation to an audience is crucial and in large part where the resistance lies in my work. — Ligia Lewis*
As the Hammer Museum, the Huntington, and an art-starved public wait for the chance to experience Made in L.A. 2020: a version in person, artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis has created a video documenting deader than dead, her work for the biennial.
Performed by Jasper Marsalis, Jasmine Orpilla, Austyn Rich, and Lewis, deader than dead “began with an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance. Utilizing this expression as a type of stasis, Lewis initially developed a choreography for ten dancers that remained expressively flat or dead, resisting any narrative or representational hold tied to a climactic build or progression. Lewis had relegated deader than dead to this corner of the gallery (a kind of ‘dead’ space) where the dance would ostensibly emerge, although deadened in its repetition, limited in its fate, as it ricocheted from wall to wall.
“[Lewis] abandoned this recursive ensemble of death due to COVID-19, reducing the cast to four performers and pivoting to a more traditionally theatrical presentation. In this new work the dancers use Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness) as the beginning of a work that unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample.”**
Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Gardens
Through March 2021.
*“Ligia Lewis and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi in Conversation,” in Made in L.A. 2020: a version (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Munich: DelMonico-Prestel, 2020).
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