THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010


KLMNO


S


C9 Shange, finding new rainbows after the storm sisters from C1


allowed me to be freer at expressing my emotions. I saw my mother’s generation putting up with stuff. I knew I did not have to.”


“Some Sing, Some Cry” blends stories, music and poetry in much the same way “For Colored Girls” did. The house lights dimmed and the sis- ters arrived onstage. Shange, in a cropped Afro, stood stage right in a green print dress that fell daringly off her shoulders, her tattooed back re- vealed. Her cane was propped nearby. Her words sounded less fiery than they did in 1976, but her voice was still force- ful: “The first orange light of sunrise left a


flush of rose and lavender on Betty’s hands as she fingered the likenesses of her children. There were tears she was holding back and cocks crowing, as well as her granddaughter’s shouts, ‘Nana, you ready?’ Betty sighed and closed the album reluctantly. Time had come for the last of the Mayfields to leave Sweet Tamarind, the plantation they’d known as home for generations.” Music took over the stage and sudden- ly the reading of the novel came alive with song and dance and acting.


Piece by piece Earlier in the evening, backstage,


Shange and Bayeza explained how they came to write this novel together, piece by piece, chapter by chapter. Shange ap- peared regal in a gold dress, bracelets dangling. Her sister, wearing jeans and a black shirt, sat across from her in a leather chair. Shange looked to her sister to help her remember and give voice to her story.


Back in 1978, soon after “For Colored Girls” became a hit, “a television pro- ducer approached us about writing a se- ries through one family of matriarchs,” Shange explained. Bayeza added: “I remember it differ-


ently. We are sisters. You can tell the same story and have different perspec- tives. I remember he wanted to do a miniseries tracing the history of the mu- sic. I thought we came up with the fami- ly.”


“Yeah, that’s right, ” Shange agreed. Bayeza continued: “He wanted to


trace the history of black music through the voices and the story of women. He had just seen ‘For Colored Girls’ and was blown away and approached Zake. And Zake was kind enough to invite me to work on this project with her.” Bayeza calls her sister “Zake.” Bayeza said they were so excited about the project that they began writing im- mediately. “We kind of birthed the story line, the basic arc of this story that after- noon right after our meeting with him,” she said. They wrote an outline, fleshing out the story by borrowing from family lore, blending historical composites of famous people and periods of African American music, weaving together fact and fiction. Finally, they produced a 100- page outline. “And nothing happened,” Bayeza said.


“It was a great idea, but it never materi- alized. The rights to the story reverted back to us.” Bayeza went off to Los Ange- les to pursue her writing career. And Shange moved to Texas to teach. “We put it on the shelf and went our respective


MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST GOOD REVIEW: Ifa Bayeza, right, and Ntozake Shange, hugging Edith Tucci, after their reading at Baird Auditorium.


ways,” Bayeza said. In 1989, Shange’s editor came across the outline for “Some Sing, Some Cry.” “How did he come across the outline?”


asked Bayeza, whose works include “Amistad Voices,” “Club Harlem,” “Ho- mer G and the Rhapsodies” and “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” which won an Edgar Award. “Oh, you gave it to him,” Shange said. Bayeza picked up the story, saying that the editor thought the outline would make a great novel. “I said, ‘I could see that.’ ” In 1995, the sisters again began work on the project. It would take them an- other 15 years to complete, with the sis- ters alternating chapters and genera- tions, writing from different perspec- tives as siblings in the same household would see and hear the same stories but perceive them differently. Then in 2004, at the age of 55, Shange


suffered a series of mini-strokes that left her unable to move or speak. The project sat on a shelf as Shange struggled to re- gain her speech and movement. Now, al- though her speech is slow, she is back in action. It was almost show time, but there were still questions: What, for instance, does Shange think of the legacy of “For Colored Girls”? “Well, the book ain’t over,” she fired


THEN AND NOW: Shange is updating her 1976 work, left, now a movie; right, the sisters’ novel tells the story of African American music.


back, not missing a beat. The poet speaks in her own time.


Between two worlds


Shange grew up in what she called a double world. She was born in 1948 in Trenton, N.J., and was given the name Paulette Williams at birth. Paulette was the oldest child of her father, a surgeon, and her mother, a social worker. She lat- er dropped what she called her “slave names” and replaced them with African names. Shange and Bayeza grew up privileged in St. Louis and Trenton. Shange would


later say she was embarrassed to be mid- dle-class, and that while there was a black revolution going on in some U.S. cities, the people she grew up around were playing bridge. She felt disconnect- ed from the privileged life, telling News- day in 1976 that her childhood “defied reality as most black people, or most white people, understood it — in other words, feeling that there was something that I could do, and then realizing that nobody was expecting me to do anything because I was colored and I was also female, which was not very easy to deal with."


Shange graduated cum laude from Barnard in 1970, and in 1973, received a master’s degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she studied dance and began per- forming her poems. She married in 1977, but it didn’t last long. “When he left me, I didn’t know what to do, so I stuck my head in an oven,” she told an interviewer soon after. “My aunt came in and pulled me out.” In a 1978 interview with Cur- rent Biography, she told the story of driv- ing home one day and seeing a rainbow and being inspired to write “For Colored Girls.” It was then, she said, she realized black women could survive on the knowledge that they “have as much right and as much purpose for being here as


air and mountains do or as the sunlight does.” She said the rainbow meant “pos- sibility to start all over again with the power and the beauty of ourselves. . . . Rainbows come after storms; they don’t come before the storm.” The characters in “For Colored Girls” had no names but were defined by col- ors: lady in brown; lady in yellow; lady in red; lady in green; lady in purple; lady in blue; lady in orange. Each lady had a story she told in a distinctive dialect, and a song. Shange gave them voice: “ . . . sing a black girl’s song,” Shange


wrote then. “bring her out / to know her- self / to know you / but sing her rhythms / carin / struggle / hard times / sing her song of life / she’s been dead so long / closed in silence so long / she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice.” The play opened at the Booth Theatre on Broadway in 1976. But the attention soon grew to be too much for the poet, and she left the cast after just one month to find her muse again. In the years that followed, Shange was prolific, producing at least 33 works, including novels, po- etry, essays and more plays. “Some Sing, Some Cry” is her first novel since “Lili- ane: Resurrection of the Daughter” was published in 1994.


Work in progress


In the dressing room at the Smithso- nian, Shange announced that “For Col- ored Girls” is still writing itself. “That is one of the reasons I’m in


Washington with my sister,” she said, to promote an updated version of “For Col- ored Girls,” to be released in November, that addresses AIDS and the war in Af- ghanistan. Before the question was asked, Shange said she is pleased with Tyler Perry’s ad- aptation of “For Colored Girls,” with its star-studded cast: Janet Jackson, Phyl- icia Rashad, Kerry Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Kimberly Elise, Thandie New- ton, Anika Noni Rose, Macy Gray and Loretta Devine. “ A lot of my language is still there,” she said, adding that the movie will al- low “For Colored Girls” to reach a broad- er audience of women. “Mr. Perry brings some great weight in terms of audience appeal.”


She admitted she had concerns when approached about the project. The Inter- net was abuzz with whether Perry, who has been criticized for his flat portrayals of black women, would do justice to the complicated characters in “For Colored Girls.” Bayeza said she thinks Perry took those concerns seriously. “He found God in himself and loved her fiercely,” she said laughing, quoting the line from “For Colored Girls.” “He did find some very interesting


film strategies for taking what is an ab- stract choreopoem and putting it in a more naturalistic setting that American film audiences are used to. ” Shange waved a bangled arm and ad-


mitted: “Yes, we were all worried: ‘How will Shange and Mr. Tyler Perry get along?’ ” she mimicked the critics. The answer, she said, is: “We are civil. And jo- vial.” The curtain was calling. Shange ended the interview, moving hurriedly to pre- pare for the stage. She had more songs to sing.


browndl@washpost.com


MUSIC REVIEW


Viennese artist’s sonic blast, worth every deafening decibel


by Aaron Leitko


The best way to withstand the sonic onslaught of a Fennesz concert: the lo- tus position. Making his D.C.-area debut Tuesday night as part of the Sonic Circuits festi- val, Vienna, Austria-based electronic composer Christian Fennesz let loose a sluice of distortion — a tidal wave of fuzz that temporarily turned the Music Center at Strathmore’s tranquil organ chamber into a sawmill. But the audience, many of whom had waited years to catch one of the composer’s rare stateside live sets, re- ceived the cochlea-mincing sounds in a state of meditation, settled comfort- ably on the venue’s wooden floor, legs crossed, eyes closed. Fennesz’s music is loud, but it is also


very pretty. Inspired in part by the effect-heavy rock bands of the mid-’90s — My Bloody Valentine, in particular — Fen- nesz uses a laptop computer to create dense compositions wrought from lay- er upon layer of electronically proc- essed electric guitar. His music can be peaceful; there are parallels to the gla- cial, synthesizer-driven new-age music of the early ’80s. But his use of dis- tortion imbues his compositions with a distinctly organic feel. Noises churn, dither and tumble over one another. Placid textures give way to torrents of intricately layered hiss. Sometimes his music evokes a barren, windswept plane. At other times, an active garbage disposal. With only his laptop, a few dis- tortion pedals and an electric guitar,


MUSIC REVIEW ‘Project’ honors Gershwin’s improv spirit by Anne Midgette If you want to scare off an audience,


offer contemporary music. If you want to soothe it, offer George Gershwin. Gershwin sits at the Venn diagram in- tersection of 20th-century art composi- tion and a rich vein of American popular music — still viewed slightly askance as too down-market in the one field and a glorious epitome of the other. This intersection is exactly the terrain


JOSH SISK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


SONIC BOOM: Fennesz’s dense works roared in the Strathmore.


Fennesz performed a continuous 30 minutes of music, incorporating sounds and motifs from his records “Venice” and “Black Sea” along with newer, possibly improvised material. He bobbed his head, fingered the track- pad on his MacBook and hammered out the occasional heavy, dissonant chord on his guitar. Fennesz’s breakthrough record,


2001’s “Endless Summer,” imbued dis- tortion with emotional depth — it had a playful, lush and summery sense of nostalgia. For a glitch-ridden abstract electronic record, it sounded strangely reminiscent of the Beach Boys. Those gentle moments were rare in


Wednesday night’s performance. In- stead, Fennesz concentrated on the heavier, darker and overpowering side of his shtick. To be on the safe side, a few audience members opted to wear earplugs. But they might have been wiser to simply endure the noise; hear- ing protection blocked out the ethereal clicks and clacks that were consigned to higher-frequency ranges. Once in a while, it’s okay to crank it up. leitkoa@washpost.com


the Post-Classical Ensemble is staking out with its “Gershwin Project” — the realm of what the group’s co-founder, Joe Horowitz, describes as Gershwin’s “cultural fluidity.” The multi-part event began on Tuesday afternoon at the Clar- ice Smith Center with what was, in ef- fect, a seminar devoted to Gershwin and improvisation. It culminates on Friday night with an orchestral concert, “The Russian Gershwin,” that will include two of the composer’s largest pieces, the “Rhapsody in Blue” and the Concerto in F, conducted by the ensemble’s other founder, Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Horowitz, one of the canniest thinkers and writers on the music scene, has de- voted a large part of his recent career to designing programs to make music more accessible to audiences. This often involves a lot of talking. Tuesday’s event was a conversation with the musicologist and Gershwin ex- pert Richard Crawford, accompanied by vintage recordings of Gershwin arrange- ments and, yes, some live performance. Vakhtang Kodanashvili, a Georgian pia- nist, offered 12 of Gershwin’s own piano arrangements of his classic songs; and Genadi Zagor, a Russian pianist whose father founded a jazz ensemble, re- sponded with improvisations, weaving themes into a fluid melange that reflect- ed not only Gershwin’s music, but the back-and-forth, anecdotal tone of the event itself.


One premise was that Gershwin, as a


TOM WOLFF ‘RHAPSODY’ NIGHT: The Post-Classical Ensemble’s tribute concludes Friday.


songwriter-turned-composer (in the words of Irving Berlin), intended his songs as templates that performers would adapt to suit — though Crawford pointed out that “improvising,” for Gershwin, meant varying the melody rather than delving into the piece’s har- monic structure. The divergence be- tween template and performance was il- lustrated through the contrast between Kodanashvili’s lush readings and the low-pedal, up-tempo approach Horowitz said Gershwin encouraged himself. “Why don’t you play this music stylis- tically correctly?” Horowitz jokingly asked the pianist, efficiently incorporat- ing the role of a critic into the perform- ance.


“I did not know I did not play it cor-


rectly,” responded Kodanashvili, a little ruefully.


But if his reading of “That Certain


Feeling” had a dreamy, nocturne-like quality rather than the crisp speediness Horowitz described, he also conveyed the song’s singing line and even a sense


The Russian Gershwin


takes place on Friday at 8 at the Clarice Smith Center. It will be preceded by a lecture by


Richard Crawford at 3:30 pm and a survey of Russian recordings of Gershwin at 7 p.m.


of the period flair: The ghost of a bril- liantined pianist playing tunes for his friends at cocktail hour lurked not far beneath the surface. Having two foreign-born pianists il-


lustrated another of Horowitz’s points: Gershwin has gotten a lot more respect abroad than he did at home, where he was long viewed as a lightweight. It was also notable that Zagor was completely comfortable as an improviser, as few classically trained pianists are on this side of the pond. All of this set the stage for “The Russian Gershwin,” which, like Tuesday’s event, if it doesn’t entirely cast the composer in a new light, will add a glint to some of his facets. midgettea@washpost.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89