Collaborating with his longtime and long-deceased friend Romare Bearden, Russell Goings has written a book-length Griot song, The Children of Children Keep Coming. It is an evocative, occasionally mesmerizing, and magnificent failure both as an epic and as a choreopoem. Yet as staged by On Q Performing Arts at Duke Energy Theater last week, it was certainly a richly memorable and exhausting evening.
An epic sustains a fairly long and majestic narrative arc - the wrath of Achilles, the wanderings of Odysseus, the migration of Aeneas, the expulsion from Eden - while a choreopoem, exemplified by Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, strings together a series of little stories in an incantatory style. We'll readily grant that Goings' style is rich in incantatory repetitions and refrains, but instead of an ongoing storyline - or a cavalcade of short stories - the poet opts for a swirl of verbiage that only fitfully gives way to monologue or dialogue.
Many figures that Goings covers in African American history are merely named or alluded to, as when he repeats the phrase "We Wear the Mask" without mentioning the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar who wrote it. Those who speak or sing to us; including Fredrick Douglas, Marian Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, the merely nicknamed "Lady Day," and the inevitable Martin Luther King; interrupt rather than advance the cloudy story that spins forward and backward until it finally lands on the night when Barack Obama was elected President.
All of these historical figures became recurring reference points rather than characters in a chronologically unfolding narrative. Only Rosa Parks brought us anywhere close to focusing on the ongoing historical struggle, but her characterization was ultimately hamstrung by its piecemeal fitfulness and her lack of engagement with anyone else. Nor was there any apparent rationale to explain the omissions from Goings' historic roll call, unless it had something to do with Bearden's drawings. Unfortunately, when Sue and I attended last Friday, the audiovisuals conked out early and never returned.
Everything else about the On Q production was nearly perfect, even though it was a staged reading. The lecterns set before the eight chorus members, with stage director/On Q founder Quentin Talley at centerstage splitting the ensemble as Chorus Leader, endowed the presentation with a churchly, sacramental aura. Adding sets, props, or costume changes all seemed like they would be pointless embroideries. Even the scripts lying on the lecterns gave extra scriptural weight to the words that might be sacrificed if the actors memorized them.
A few resting points - and a few sprinklings of lightheartedness - might help a fully-staged production. Surely there should be more and better choreography than we saw here from LaTanya Johnson.
Talley's exhortations probably did more than anything else to keep the evening from going leaden and tedious, but there was really no diminution of excellence among his Chorus. Nicole Watts was the most consistently pleasing, landing the roles of both Rosa Parks and Lady Day, but Tiffany Moore Borgelin was no less commanding as Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, and the ever-enigmatic Calli of the Valley. A standout in For the Love of Harlem two years ago as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Justin Moore as Dr. King and Abe Lincoln proves to be a talent we should be seeing more often - in more truly dramatic roles.
As a choreopoem, The Children of Children is an impressive, slightly oppressive failure. Coupled with Bearden's drawings - and hopefully a diligently-assembled list of "Further Recommended Readings" - it figures to be a treasurable book.
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