Family Memory on Stage
10. Theater of the Present: Writing to the Moment and to the Audience
10.3 African-American Music and Musical References
In the formation of African-American identity black music has become an important means of cultural self-definition and self-affirmation. From spirituals and blues to jazz and rap, black music “was considered an instrument of truth, the ‘purest expression’ of the black reality in America; [...].”335 Playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange included black music in their theatrical work to deal with topics such as racism, sexism and the formation of African-American cultural identity. For the characters in their plays, black music not only calls forth an aesthetic pleasure, supporting the emotional atmosphere of the dramatic speech on stage; it also signifies a “coded and private language”336 that provides a “cultural matrix for an orientation in history.”337
In Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) there are several scenes in which blues music is heard during the performance.338 The play is set in Chicago, one of the blues’
335 Larry Neal, "Into Nationalism, out of Parochialism," The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980): 297.
336 Margaret B. Wilkerson, "Music as Metaphor: New Plays of Black Women," Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1989): 62.
337 Wilfried Raussert, Negotiating Temporal Differences: Blues, Jazz and Narrativity in African American Culture (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000): 161.
338 Hansberry also includes music as a dramatic device in the telescript The Drinking Gourd (1959) and in her plays after A Raisin in the Sun. For a detailed analysis of sound and music in these writings see Deborah Jean Wood, "Plays of Lorraine Hansberry: Studies in Dramatic Form,"
Thesis, University Microfilms, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1985: 96-138.
10. Theater of the Present: Writing to the Moment and to the Audience 188
geographical strongholds during the time of the play’s first production.339 In an interview Hansberry once emphasized that she did not present just any black family, but “a specifically Southside Chicago”340 one, which is also indicated by the characters’
preference for blues music. Mirroring the fact that the broadcast of blues music by radio-DJs such as Alan Freed had been common since the 1940s, the characters’ radio is usually turned on in the play so that the music accompanies the action presented on stage. While Ruth and Beneatha Younger are cleaning the apartment, the radio program “is inappropriately filling the house with a rather exotic blues” (RIS 525), and Ruth is listening to “the good loud blues that is playing” (RIS 532) while ironing. On the family’s moving day Walter and his wife Ruth dance to the music played on the record player, to express their happiness and “new-found exuberance” (RIS 540). When Walter is appointed the head of the family and becomes responsible for the family’s savings, the gravity and emotional intensity of this moment is transported in music. He “sits looking at the money on the table as the music continues in its idiom, pulsing in the room” (RIS 540). For the characters in A Raisin in the Sun, the blues is not just an acoustic expression of their feelings and emotions, but it signifies a unique African-American cultural background that they identify with. According to Walter, the saxophonist in his favorite pub “ain’t but ‘bout five feet tall and he’s got a conked head and his eyes is [sic] always closed and he’s all music...[sic]” (RIS 540). He “talks to [Walter]” (RIS 540) through his blues music that is introduced as a unique acoustic expression of black American culture and identity.
This representation of black music as a marker of African-American identity is most strikingly evident in Shange’s theatrical invention of the so-called choreopoem of for colored girls. As the compound word derived from choreography and poetry already indicates, Shange’s play strongly works with the effects of dancing and physical movement on stage. It combines dramatic speech with song, dance, and music to create a physical theater and “a total event,”341 in which dance and music are not conceived as ornamental elements that merely enrich the aesthetic quality of the performance, but
339 For a detailed discussion of the history of the blues see for example Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) and Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
340 Lorraine Hansberry, "Make New Sounds: Studs Terkel Interviews Lorraine Hansberry,"
American Theatre 1.2 (November 1984): 5.
341 Paul C. Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972): 231.
rather as the very constituents of the performance and the dramatic text. In her work Shange introduces a new style of writing and an unconventional orthography to visualize
“the idea that letters dance”342 and to create a musical form of language. For the female archetypes presented in the play, dance serves as a “defense mechanism”343 and a liberating “survival tool”344 to deal with the challenges of “bein [sic] a woman & bein colored” (FCG 45). As the lady in orange explains: “[…] i can make the music loud enuf / so there is no me but dance / & when i can dance like that / there’s nothing cd hurt me / […]” (FCG 42-43). In the preface to her play Shange explains that dance and music enabled her to discover her own body and identity:
Knowing a woman’s mind & spirit had been allowed to me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs & backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman & as a poet.
(FCG xi)
For Shange, dance and music are “endemically black in some cultural way”345 and represent a distinct African-American cultural identity, which is transmitted in music on stage. In addition to references to traditional children’s songs such as “mama’s little baby likes shortnin [sic] bread” (FCG 6) and “Little Sally Walker” (FCG 6) dating back to the 19th century,346 for colored girls primarily focuses on contemporary music from the 1960s and 1970s, again approximating the temporal background on stage and the historical background of the play’s first production. Shange borrows from black musical groups such as the famous all-black R&B band The Dells and their 1968 hit “Stay in My Corner”
(FCG 9) as well as from black musicians such as Willie Colon, a contemporary Puerto
342 Ntozake Shange, "Interview," Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York:
Continuum, 1983): 163.
343 Philip U. Effiong, In Search of a Model for African-American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000): 126.
344 Neal A. Lester and Ntozake Shange, Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays (New York: Garland Pub., 1995): 42.
345 Neal A. Lester, "Interview with Ntozake Shange," Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, eds. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996): 217-218.
346 Especially the song “Little Sally Walker” is included in several early anthologies of children’s songs such as William W. Newell, Games and Songs of American Children (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883).; and Alan Lomax, J. D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes, Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
10. Theater of the Present: Writing to the Moment and to the Audience 190
Rican salsa musician born in New York City in 1950. “[L]et willie colon take you out / swing your head / push your leg to the moon with me” (FCG 15) is the lady in orange’s advice to the other characters and to the audience, while his song “Che Che Cole” is played on stage. In one of the scenes the characters start to dance to the song “Dancing in the Streets.” According to the stage directions, “[t]he lady in green, the lady in blue, and the lady in yellow do the pony, the big boss line, the swim, and the nose dive. The other ladies dance in place” (FCG 7). This song was first recorded in 1964 by Martha and the Vandellas, the first and most popular all-black girl bands that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. “Dancing in the Street,” which is probably the band’s best-known song, was very successful in the 1960s and 1970s and was certainly very appealing to a contemporary audience in 1976.
10.4 Conclusion
Works of art such as texts, paintings, and sculptures are generally created for eternity.
Although they are produced at a special moment in history, they are not the exclusive property of a particular time or a particular generation. In a written or otherwise archived form they transcend time and are passed on from one generation to the next. In theatrical art, however, this temporal universality contrasts with the actual moment of performance.
A dramatic text is spectator-oriented, so that writing a dramatic text is writing for a special moment of performance and for a special kind of audience. A dramatic text is always constitutively anchored in the specific historical and cultural background of its production, as the analysis of 20th-century African-American theater by female playwrights has shown.
All of the 20th-century African-American female playwrights considered here produce what may be called a ‘Theater of the Present’ based on the principle of contemporaneity, i.e. on the approximation of the plots’ fictional present and the contemporary historical present of the plays’ productions. According to the stage directions, the plays are all set in a particular moment of “the present.” The plays tend to equate the presented temporal background on stage with the real historical background of the play’s first production, creating a kind of extrinsic simultaneity between the stage and the real world of a contemporary audience. Drawing on a direct relationship between the
fictional plot and African-American national history, the plays are very much situated in a specific cultural context and in a specific moment in time, making them transient and ephemeral to a certain extent.
By approximating the “speaker-now”347 and the ‘audience-now’ the plays create effects of inclusion and exclusion for the audience by presupposing a specific background of knowledge, which may not be shared by a non-contemporary audience. The plays turn the characters and the audience into contemporaries who are assumed to share a certain body of experiences including knowledge of current events and issues such as the Vietnam War, the 1964 Harlem Race Riot, and the Anita Hill-Thomas Clarence affair in 1991. References to and borrowings from African-American social history, politics, as well as popular black music in dramatic speech ensure that the dramatic situation is constituted in the speech-act, sending out a number of implicit signals that are supposed to make the historical situation more concrete to the audience. The playwrights do not feel obliged to explain these references to contemporary contexts; they expect their audiences to be familiar with current events, developments, and discourses in African-American history, so that they are able to decipher the specific names and dates mentioned in the speech-acts. Based on the principle of contemporaneity, the dramatic approximation of fictional time and historical time creates a closed community of knowledge, a temporary communitas,348 between the playwright, the characters, and the target audience who is familiar with the specific social, political, and cultural background referred to on stage.
As playwright Shange points out: “I have an overwhelming amount of material I could footnote if I wanted to. I could make my work very official and European and say the
‘Del Vikings’ were a group of singers... the ‘Shorrells’ were a group...but why should I.
I’m not interested in doing an annotated Shange.”349
347 Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction: 125.
348 Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York:
Performing Arts Journal Pub., 1982): 47.
349 Shange, "Interview": 163. Italics original.
11. Conclusion: Re-Thinking the African-AmericanLiterary Canon 192