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Friday, September 21, 2018

How is whiteness a learned performance?

By Susan Yung

Director Patricia McGregor asks you (yes, you): Has gentrification been a protagonist or antagonist in your life? Why and how?
Place began with Ted Hearne addressing the intersections of privilege and appropriation in his own life and work, weighing a personal sense of place and space in the most immediate family relationships against the inherited and generational.



How is whiteness a learned performance?
Saul Williams calls Place a fiery meditation on gentrification. Ted’s opening libretto was a volley to Saul, who responded to Ted’s words—complicating, expanding, implicating, addressing, and redressing Ted’s narrow view, to consider the experiences of others across the street, across the globe and across time. “You realize your inability to face these things may drive me crazy? Do you realize that it may have already driven you crazy?”

Ted wrote Place to be sung by specific people he grew up singing with in Chicago—Josephine, Allison, Isaiah—and by individuals he encountered in different musical contexts later in life—Ayanna, Steven, Sol. Music was, at times, its own map that cut through the boundaries of streets he otherwise would not have crossed. The 18 instrumentalists come from different places too—RC and Braylon play with R&B and hip-hop artists, Philip plays solo noise sets, Matt and Diana play with orchestras—and the adjacency and overlay of their individual relationships to music is another kind of map.

While the piece was drawn from a matrix of specific collaborators, there are no static characters here. The singers are at once themselves and shifting, situational archetypes in an ongoing conversation that dissolves, complicates and refreshes characters through poems set to music.

Through this process, our focus has shifted to DISplaceMENT. While workshopping the piece at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, we were aware that we were only a couple of blocks from tent cities, and that we were standing on ground that had been home to Tongva people long before. Where had/have those displaced people and their descendants found to make a new home?

How fitting that we premiere the piece at BAM. Fort Greene has played a major role in all three of our lives. When we walk out of the Harvey doors after the performance, we will encounter a landscape that has changed drastically in the last couple of decades. If that change is for better or worse, why and for whom, is for you to decide.

Patricia McGregor
Ted Hearne
Saul Williams


Excerpts from the libretto of Place

Is it ok to say?
By Saul Williams

Is it ok to say
white supremacy
in white spaces?

Can we get
to the bottom
of this?

Is it ok to say
bottom?

Is it ok to say?

Is it ok to say your kind
not welcome
here?

Is it ok to say
welcome?

Is it ok to say?
Is it ok to say?

Am I ok?

(amiokamiokamiokamiokamiok)

Is it ok to say
I did not Not
make these rules?

Is it ok to say
sorry and do it
anyway?

Is it ok? Is it ok? Is it ok?

Is it ok to let some anger show?

Even if it has no place?

Is it ok? Is it ok? Is it ok?
Is it ok? Is it ok? Is it ok?


This Land Was Worth Every War
By Saul Williams

My anger
is beautiful

but my beauty is all the rage.

I am richest soil.
I am the lakeside view.
I am the highest hill.
I am a funeral.

And this land was worth every war.

…and the land was mined.
And the land is mine.

And the land was mined. And the land is mine.


And the land was mined.
And the land is mine.

My anger
is beautiful
but my beauty
is all the rage.

I am richest soil.
I am the lakeside view.
I am the highest hill.
I am a funeral.

And this land was worth every war.

By Saul Williams

© 2018 Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

2 comments:

  1. These poems are wonderful and push the idea of gentrification from a strictly racial lens.

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