Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cast a Wide Net

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2006.0026

1086-332X

Joni L. Jones,

Cast a Wide Net Joni L. Jones and Iya Omi Osun Olomo When works defy the prevailing concept of what constitutes an art form, they are often dismissed as faulty or overlooked all together until historians resurrect them and contextualize them through the clarifying lens of hindsight. In responding to the questions "What is a black play/What is playing black?," I want to call attention to the work of some contemporary artists who could be dismissed because their approaches to theatre making do not mirror those of more publicly prominent black artists, and who might be overlooked because few people are discussing their work within the context of "black theatre." During the Black Arts Movement, Adrienne Kennedy fell into a similar black blind spot. Her early work was nurtured by Edward Albee and Michael Kahn at Circle in the Square Rep rather than with Barbara Ann Teer at the National Black Theatre, Amiri Baraka at Black Arts Repertory Theatre, Douglas Turner Ward at the Negro Ensemble Company, or Robert Macbeth at the New Lafayette Theatre. Ironically, in terms of content, Kennedy's Funnyhouse of the Negro and The Owl Answers both express a complex black identity that pushes blackness out of the racist boxes that Baraka also worked against. Structurally, her work foreshadows Paul Carter Harrison's declaration in "Mother/Word" that black drama could not be contained within psychological realism, but instead needed a "drama of nommo"—non-linear, cross-genre, ritually driven work. Kennedy earned her reputation in the avant-garde theatre world while other black artists (mostly men with decidedly nationalist politics) were solidifying what a "black play" was and what "playing black" might be. Similarly, the artists I mention here have often found homeplace more comfortably in so-called experimental or avant-garde theatre communities. Few have been embraced by black theatres or large black audiences. Kennedy and the jazz aesthetic artists I discuss here share an unapologetic emphasis on the subjective experience of one character, a memory-laden sense of time and place, a keen attention to the visual/physical/imagistic aspects of their work, and polyrhythmic musically driven language; they also share in their exclusion from the generally accepted understanding of black theatre which tends toward linear realism. This essay is a preliminary attempt at acknowledging the avant-garde aesthetics of jazz aesthetic artists while simultaneously revealing their kinship with "black plays" and "playing black." There are several artists who are part of an artistic lineage that I have come to call a theatrical jazz aesthetic. This work began to form in the early 1970s alongside the Black [End Page 598] Arts Movement in the Sounds in Motion Harlem dance studio under the tutelage of Dianne McIntyre. Sounds in Motion became the artistic workshop for a host of legendary performance artists including Laurie Carlos, Ntozake Shange, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Marlies Yearby, and musicians Cecil Taylor, Craig Harris, Sekou Sundiata, and Olu Dara, with whom McIntyre continues to create work. This simultaneous "movement" fused music/sound, dance/movement and the spoken word, was primarily initiated and perpetuated by women, relied on breath as the spiritual fire of the work, and set no limits on blackness. Unlike the various manifestoes of the period—Baraka's "Revolutionary Theatre" that declared, "White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them," or Larry Neal's insistence that Black theatre move away from the parochial toward the national while apparently unaware of the ultimate narrowness of the nationalist move he proposed, or Woodie King's Black Theatre, Present Condition that fashioned black in phallocentric terms, or Douglas Turner Ward's New York Times essay that led to a Ford Foundation grant which created the famed Negro Ensemble Company—unlike these very public delimiting pronouncements, the jazz aesthetic that was forming in a small Harlem dance studio was feeling the multivocal, expansive black impulses that seemed absent from the larger Black Arts Movement. A theatrical jazz aesthetic borrows many elements from the musical world of jazz—improvisation, process over product, ensemble synthesis, solo virtuosity—and disrupts the traditional conventions of Western theatre, including a single narrative with a throughline and causal relationships that rely on psychological coherence...