Photo Credit: Adam Kissick
The big Marcus Center news this week is the opening of a month-long run of Disney’s The Lion King, the only Broadway show aside from Hamilton to have so long a run there. I’m here to tell you, though, about a one-night-only performance on Wednesday, Feb. 12, in the Marcus Center’s smaller Wilson Theater in Vogel Hall.
It’s a multimedia dance theater performance titled Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word Nigger, a title hard to type without flinching and impossible to speak. The show examines why that word is unredeemable in any form or spelling. After watching a video of the performance and communicating via email with its talented young creator, Jade Solomon Curtis, I encourage you to see it if you can. You’ll find yourself, I think, joined with an audience community in profound consideration of what it means to be born in a black body. For choreographer and dance artist Curtis, it means the responsibility to address “the reverb” of a word coined by whites to dehumanize black folks for all sorts of purposes. Her company’s vision statement: “Activism is the muse.”
The show is also beautiful, crafted with great thoughtfulness and care. At its center is a gripping conversation about the n-word with several older, gentle, learned onstage cohorts that expands to include the audience. Curtis herself is a teacher and concerned for young people of all races. This piece, she maintains, is for them. It opens with “a pre-show experience that incorporates video projections and hip-hop playlists curated by young people 15-18 years old,” she writes. The show goes on to argue that the current slang version, “nigga,” which is used in rap music and sometimes as a so-called term of endearment among black people, only prolongs the history of hate and self-hate.
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The performance is in five parts. In each, Curtis plays a different character with appropriate costume, music, lighting and projected scenery. Part one is called “Emancipation.” A gorgeous field of tall grass gently waves in the breeze on large video screens filling three sides of the stage. While a voice sings a heavenly spiritual tune, a black woman wakes there, alone and free. She discovers her body in amazing movement and stillness. What fate is hers? Curtis writes of “the body’s ability to serve as an artifact of memory, space and time.” In the show’s mid-point conversation, a cohort says, “To resolve my ancestral karma, it’s my job to fix the damage that’s been done.”
Outrageous Racial Profiling
“Colored on the Wall” is the title of part two. Those full-stage screens fill with actual Evanston Police Department dash cam footage. We see and hear police commit outrageous acts of racial profiling, including the famous video of the doomed Sandra Bland accosted violently in her car for no reason. Then, Curtis appears in video in a yellow jumpsuit and hoodie on a city street, and she appears simultaneously on the stage in that costume. She dances superbly, her face concealed by the pulled-up hoodie, vulnerable, panicked, as photos of lynched black men fill the screens.
Titled “Untitled,” part three is that audience conversation. Curtis’ company, Solo Magic, is partnering with the Marcus Center “to curate a community panel encompassing people from the Solo Magic team and the Milwaukee community” to discuss their own experiences with the n-word and engage the audience in that conversation. Curtis bares her soul throughout in improvised movements. Within a 23-minute time limit, “everyone who chooses to speak is acknowledged and heard,” and “a social media wall displays real-time audience responses via Instagram, Twitter and anonymous phone texts.”
The final two parts deal with uses of the word in current hip-hop culture. In “A Star Called Nigga,” Curtis portrays that star, a demoralized sex object. In “Under Fire,” she dances hip-hop in a red suit, felled by gunfire every time the word is uttered by the rapper.
Developed over years, the completed production premiered in North Hollywood in September. In earlier versions, it’s been performed internationally; but in its finished state, it was performed just 10 times, sometimes for youth-only audiences. “The show asks us to be curious, to ask questions and participate in understanding the foundation this country was built on,” Curtis summarizes. “It’s important to understand that the arts play a vital role in transforming and exposing these much-needed conversations.”
The Marcus Center’s director of programming, John Hassig, discovered the work at a booking conference in New York. ”Often the hardest part of a difficult conversation is starting it,” he says. “Thankfully, art and artists have a magical way of expressing emotions at multiple levels, simultaneously leading to a jump start of thought and empathy. Art can be an agent for change, and this show is seeking to make a change that will take time and effort. Jade is looking to change the narrative.”
Black Like Me plays at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Feb.12, at the Marcus Center’s Wilson Theater, 929 N. Water St. For tickets, call 414-273-7206 or visit marcuscenter.org.
