And somewhere, in the bent light at that other edge of your named arc, you look toward the camera lens as the breeze traces your freckled face and you smile. The split second shutter-click a prelude to polyrhythmic projection. You cannot imagine the things you will be – to them all, to us all. You cannot imagine the tolls you will pay – and the howling empty that will accompany so many of your hours. A blessing, then, that the future, like the breeze, sweeps in from behind your shoulders. But in that instant your palms, out of frame, are open. Did you know then you were a warrior? The sad eyes say yes. Did you know then that you would keep the free in you? Did you know then that the light of angels can burn as well as illuminate? Were we to have seen the light lifting from your skin on this day would it have been green as new leaves when you looked toward the camera and smiled? Lena. Here, as the last traces of your named arc are drawn into deep night, we watch distant stars flicker on. The sound of our gratitude is hushed, for it is a close sound. It is the sound of us breathing. Just that much fuller, just that much freer, just that much more boldly. The sound of our gratitude is the sound of your light. We see it lifting softly from the skin of a newly coined angel standing gently and smiling into a dark glass lens while somewhere behind her a freer future is sketching itself awake because she wishes it to be so and has the courage to breathe it into being.

photographed by Carl Van Vechten

My Mom also had a long history of public work, but when she chose to stay at home to raise us, largely turned her attentions inward.  Yet, she was equally hard working.  The obvious work of “homemaking” as it was called then was a satellite site of labor compared to the creative and intellectual work she did.  She taught me that imagining is work – acts of creativity are as demanding in their own way as other forms of labor whose processes and products are more immediately tangible.  Creative exploration in familiar and unfamiliar ways was truly my Mom’s life work.  Though she did work outside the home for a period of my upbringing, largely, her work took place within.  We were a part of a middle-class America that doesn’t exist in the same form anymore. There was never a lot of money; little or no savings; comfort but no luxury.  On the one hand my Mom “could afford” not to work in the world, even though her not working in the world meant that my parents and our family barely made do and did not plan well for the future in a “practical” sense.  On the other hand, she could not afford to work in the world.  She was an artist in the old-school sense – 100% attuned to ways of seeing and being that were saturated, durational, emotional, intuitive, practice-based.  Routine, ultimately, smothered her, and she knew it, and therefore resisted it in every way she could. But, throughout all, she worked.  I make this assignation of work, and I do wonder if she would see it as such, so connected are the members of her generation to a rigid vocabulary around certain concepts.  She and my father were both children of the Depression and WWII whose sympathies were with the Hippies ten years their juniors, but whose social demeanor was forged in an inflexible era.  They would shuttle between abandon and constraint, a paradoxical dance that itself shaped many of my own contradictions.

Whenever, during the course of my life, friends would visit my house, they quickly learned that it was a place where you had to work – again, not in a literal physical way (although sometimes that way, too) but rather, in the sense that you had to show up and be fully present and engage with all you had in whatever was going on.  We never had chit chat in my house.  We had throw-down, body-slamming, heart-on-the-line cosmological, philosophical, ethical debate/conversation/testimony.

For Colored Girls… dramatically centralized Black Women’s voices, clearing and claiming resonant, redolent and generative space at a time when such a public and performative marking had huge impact. The piece distinguished itself from white feminisms, the black arts movement and the theatre establishment by default. Its purpose was not reactionary. Its purpose was creative. For Colored Girls… was the exponential sounding of the subjective and objective realities, dreams and metaphysics – through POETRY and EMBODIMENT – of the women whose presences and stories populated it. Ntozake Shange’s vision was bolstered by the profound collaborative contributions of its cast members and artist friends (I knew and worked with Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley and Jessica Hagedorn and have long admired the work of many of the other women who were in or around the piece over the years of its initial life.) Yes, there were men involved – Oz Scott, Woodie King, Joe Papp – so the “issue” I have is not about Perry’s gender.

But, it is about the fact – the FACT – that the space opened and held by this play was one that radically altered the physics of performance. Never before (to my knowledge, which is, admittedly limited) – to the extent that For Colored Girls… achieved – had the crossroads of poetry, movement, acting/sounding/possession charged a “major” performance venue with unabashed Black Womanhood. Never before had a play moved with such elliptical, intuitive sense – precisely demonstrating the intellectual prowess of its writer and performers through a structure that looked, sounded and felt like a wholly different cosmology than that articulated through the lens of Aristotelian poetics and psychological realism. The play stopped our limited experience of time and space and place and did us all a favor by suggesting that we might want to think about how these principles operate expansively (no matter what our “identities” may have been.) And it was REAL – LIVE – SWEATY – HEART-WRENCHING and TRANSCENDENT. It was FIFTH DIMENSIONAL – here we go, I’ve written my way to the point, as usual. For Colored Girls… is not a film. There will be a film called For Colored Girls… by Tyler Perry adapted from the play by Ntozake Shange – yes. But the For Colored Girls… I’m writing about – is not a film, cannot be a film, cannot be captured in two dimensions. It is a rite that alters the agreed-upon reality we are all consuming; it is a ritual that makes all witnesses into participants and in so doing makes us responsible for a radical and, perhaps, dangerously beautiful way of seeing. I will choose to go to that place – that cliché-shattering, form-altering, physics-shifting place – any day. Just as fear cannot exist in the eye of pure love; mediocrity cannot exist in the real light of For Colored Girls…

• For instance, more archival video clips. Some of the projects are – ahem – close to 15 years old, so the quality of the video is not as great as today’s digital, but I feel it’s important to share some sense of how the work lived in performance.
• More images. Tons and tons.
• Links – a huge number of links to encourage you to visit many wonderful artists and organizations.

For now? Have fun looking around. Please click on the JOIN page above and sign up to receive notifications of upcoming performances and events.