Download 11_chapter 4

145
Chapter IV
BLACK THEATRE DRAMATURGIES
Theatre of a specific time, place and society more efficiently exhibits the
general characteristics of the society. Theatre is the reflection of the society by whom
and for whom it is presented. The emergence the black theatre is a socio-cultural
phenomenon and must be examined on that point of view. As Olga Barrios states ―…
audience/black community and culture were enhanced by black artists, consciousness
became the main didactic goal that needed to be taken to the back community, so
that they could abandon their passive role and take action‖ (14). The theatres of the
Harlem did not concentrate on the development of the African American community
and the culture on its behalf. The theatre of the sixties attained this basic goal for
which African American theatre emerged. The theatrical production by blacks serves
as a tool for research into ethnic identity and also aids to express the appropriate
means artistically, for an analysis of the situation of blacks in America. The theatrical
production by black serves as a tool for research into ethnic identify or to explain
artictically ―for analysis of the situation of blacks in North America, for symbolic
expression of the black world view and experience‖ (Fabre 1).
The premises of the black theatre is predicated on a set of aesthetic values and
culture that is informed by those values. Cultural values determine the qualitative
standard of an art. The aesthetic value of the culture must be understood before the
analysation of the art.
Black drama underwent a drastic change in the twentieth century to attain the
present extreme point of rebellion. The birth of the black theatre has been traced as
the outcome of the practices older than the presence of Africans in America. Slaves
were entertainers, too, who provided shows for their white masters on plantations.
146
The white masters also continued to request these performers to entertain them. The
image of the traditional black has been presented for whites to express their own
experience within their world, ―both as metaphor of more general aspects of the
human predicament and as mask for…. personal experience and philosophy‖
(Sanders 1).
The religious gathering of the blacks organised secretly without the
knowledge of whites allowed for the development of the different type of theatrical
ceremony. These various dramatizations of the blacks either being official or secret, in
the presence of white or without them, on secular or religious holidays provided
opportunities for them to come in contact with their collective expression and serve as
a means of reflection about communal life.
PLATE III
U.S slave entertain his master on Christmas eve.
James Weldon Johnson remarks about the romance of negro in the play that
were ignored by whites as :
One of the well-known taboos was that there should never be any
romantic love in a negro play. If anything approaching a love duet as
147
introduced in a musical comedy, it had to be broadly burlesqued. The
reason behind this taboo lay in the belief that love scene between two
Negroes could not strike a White audience expect as ridiculous. The
taboo existed in difference to the superiority stereotype that Negroes
cannot be supposed to mate romantically, but do so in some sort of
ministrel fashion or in some more primeval manner that white people.
This taboo has been one of the strictly observed. (171)
The black theatre satisfied only the first condition of its definition as a theatre
about blacks, written by blacks, and acted by blacks for a black audience. Though
barely recognized, black writers played a big part in interpreting roles. The
relationship between the theatre and the community appeared to be largely
unobserved
The black theatre granted liberties that were usually forbidden among black
slaves. The language of the theatre gradually grew bolder, the gestures grew more
emphatic, and emotions were exaggerated without fear. The actors also played the
duties of director or playwright enacting poked fun at themselves. These productions
proved to be the forerunner of contemporary Afro-American theatre. The way in
which they dramatized life aroused the audience to react through the use of call and
response patterns. The popular genre on the American stage for decades was the
minstrel show which was given birth by the slave theatricals. In a ministrel show, the
white authors ―caricatured blacks with comic and sentimental songs, skits, gits, and
shuffles dances‖ (Wilson 360)
.One of the first theatre companies to approach the dramatic performing arts
from an African American perspective was, ‗The African Grove Theatre‘ in New
York City. It was founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett. Willian
148
Henry Brown was the first African American dramatist who published his first drama
The Drama of King Shotaway (1823).
The African Grove Theatre, was the first black theater company in New York
City. It stands as an example of how African Americans could successfully establish
their own institutions and spur a creative movement. As there was gradual growth of
the social and economic conditions for blacks, they began to realize that there was a
need to create public spaces for their community. The growing demand for culture
compelled the black community to build an entertainment venue to be accommodated
within the neighborhood. On Mercer Street near Bleecker, a simple wooden structure
was constructed which accommodated 300-400 individuals. The black actors
enhanced poetry readings and short dramas which had been popular at the tea-garden.
These developments led way for the African Grove Theatre to be born.
PLATE IV
The current site of African American grove theatre.
www.african theatre.com
149
In the beginning the African Grove Theatre was created only for entertainment
purposes which was performed by blacks. The first African Grove Theater located at
Mercer Street near Houston. It was built on the second floor of a two-storey house
with a large tea garden in the backyard.
The first productions include ballad operas, a popular form of entertainment
that was largely based on recitation and integration of songs to express sentiments.
The utilization of popular theater forms explained the theater's ability to be tuned to
execution methods and to the choices of the audience.
The company performed tragedies and comedies from Shakespeare to
American playwrights. Eventually, the opposition of the white won out over the
tenacity of the black actors, directors and producers of The African Grove Theater
Company and it was forced to close its doors permanently. The blacks did not loose
their hopes. They continued to open theatres and produce dramas in spite of the
oppossion from the white.
The opening of the theatre in Harlem raised the hope of freeing black theatre
from the obstacles that had caused the failure of earlier attempts such as the African
grove. The previously unheard possibilities for theatre were provided by the presence
of a large Afro-American audience and stage. The Afro-Americans proved their talent
by creating spontaneous shows by converting common events into group
manifestations, and for contributory ritualized responses like ‗Amen‘ and ‗right on‘.
Their traditions made theatrical expressions familiar and rendered them more apt to
decode an oral and a visual message than a written one. All the conditions seemed to
exist for strong links between the artist and the actor or dramatist and with the
community.
150
Black performers, for many years, could work only by finding ways to
perform in minstrel shows, ‗in blackface.‘ This was largely due to the audience
expectations created by the white performers. This bizarre situation strengthened the
opinion that the portrayal of blackness and black people on white stages was not real.
Even black actors, wearing silly costumes had to execute the ideas of blackness by
darkening as prescribed by whites.
In the 1920s and 30s the Black artists, writers and musicians began responding
to the racist depictions and created their own artistic representations of black life and
philosophy. These black playwrights continued their challenge to create a definite
reality theatre, ―to demetaphorize the figure of the black and make that of the white
metaphorical‖ (Sharadha 3). Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer were particularly
concerned with white representations of blackness in the theatre. Langston Hughes‘
famous poem Notes on Commercial Theater echoed one of the founding tenets of
another critical moment in black theater history of the 1960s.
In the poem Note on commercial theatre Hughes deals about the issues of the
day which includes the controversies of the African American culture becoming
‗vague‘,the interest in black writing and arts and the raise of jazz and theatre scenes.
The poem also shows an anxiety over the dependence of black culture and patronage.
This was the period when most of the celebrated black writers responded
uproariously to racism. Self-representation became a major focus of the civil rights
Movement. Artists such as Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Nikki Giovanni, Harold Cruse,
Ray Durem, Adrienne Kennedy, Larry Neal and Sonia Sanchez all produced seminal
works during this period of time. In 1959 Lorraine Hansberry‘s famous play A Raisin
in the Sun was screened on Broadway. It was the first time a play written by a black
female playwright, directed by a black director Lloyd Richards and written about
151
black people was presented. The next twenty years saw an eruption of African
American theater companies springing up around the country.
The observations of W.E.Abrams is remains explicit on the ‗reproductive
verisimilitude‘ of African art as an analogy for the objectives of Black Theatre in the
Diaspora of well-rounded characterization. He says,
Traditional African art was not literary or descriptive, employing
conventional devices for effects like a kind of code-language. It was
direct, magical, attempting a sort of plastic analogue of onomatopoeia,
to evince and to evoke feelings which the subjects induced in one….
The superlative achievement of African art probably lies in the control
achieved over deformity and its associated feelings in their
societies.(112)
It is this traditional African art that has been employed by Shange in all her
works particularly in her choero dramas. Her passion for literature has been
channelized through ‗a night journey marked by music, movement, improvisation,
and smells of perfume, sweat, and humid star-flickering nights.‘ She loves the
language of the African‘s tongue for which she pays tribute and homage. It is this
language that flow through St.Louis that has made a ‗indelible impression‘ on her.
Her ‗sense of rhythm, melody, irony, and beauty‘ all she has obtained from ‗that
earth, that river.‘
A very clear evident of such a culture has its roots of African-American music,
buried deep within the African continent. The history and evolution of AfricanAmerican music is as rich and complex as the history of African Americans
themselves. The essence of African-American music lies in its expression of the
human experience. Although the different styles vary widely in their tone, topic and
152
the tools used to produce them, African-American music has the ability to cross all
colours and culture lines. Music styles such as the blues, jazz, gospel and hip hop
have spread their influence all over the world.
Although music in ancient Africa varied widely by location, it was an
important part of African culture. Africans who came to the United States during the
slave trade brought much of their African heritage with them. This included their
musical traditions. In many parts of West Africa, from which many slaves were
bought, music was very rhythmic and incorporated a heavy use of drums as the slave
owners feared that the slaves would use the drums as a means of communication in
order to plan rebellions. Drums were restricted. As a result, slaves had to adopt to the
European instruments such as the fiddle. Nevertheless, African American slaves used
music to help them make it through the horrors of slavery. ‗Work songs‘ and ‗field
hollers‘ were sung by slaves while doing hard labour in the fields. These songs
incorporated the ‗call-and-response‘ style used widely in Africa, where the lead singer
would call out a phrase and the other singers would give a call back as a response.
Shange builds a new multi-dimensional dramatic pattern that deforms an
oppressive language and conversational style, by employing her idea in an artistic
means to unclear the development of action and character. She believes in this multidimensional aspect of a drama ―can relay diverse, though related themes through
several voices and individual representations.‖ For her every individual member ―is
an individual power, and an individual voice, in the ensemble and outside of it.‖ She
explains this in her lost in language and sound.
as a poet in american theatre/ i find most activity that takes place on
our stages overwhelmingly shallow/ stilted & imaginative. that is
probably one of the reasons i insist on calling myself a poet or writer/
153
rather playwright/ i am interested solely in the poetry of a moment/ the
emotional & aesthetic impact of a character or a line/ for too long now
afro-americans in the theatre have been duped by the same artificial
aesthetics that plague our white counterparts/ ‗the perfect play,‘ as we
know it to be / a truly european framework for european psychology/
cannot function efficiently for those of us from this hemisphere.(13)
Shange's faith in African-based traditions is illustrated by her use of dance,
song, music, poetry, and ceremony in dramas. Her view of Africa is similar to that of
her contemporaries. Africa for them is an incarnation of an affinity system creating
bondage between Africans and African-Americans. Shange has dramatized Africa as
a far off but an ―accessible‖ homeland and a distinctive source when she draws the
cultural link from Africa to Black America in her works. Evaluating Shange's interests
in her African heritage, Brown-Guillory states,
not only did she postulant the choreopoem, but she brought to the
American healer MM art that is undeniably African…Africa's mythical
drama, containing songs, drums, dance, rituals, masks, chants, music,
and the call and response. (41)
This chapter titled ‗Black Theatre Dramaturgies‘ enlists the myriad fame of
techniques which Shange has incorporated in all her dramas. A vivid analysis of all
the African techniques- chorus, music, dance, stream of consciousness, flashback,
chant, rituals, mask, monologues, soliloquies, backdrops, magic, play with in play
formula and story -telling and their significance in the Shange‘s choreo drama have
been analysed.
Shange manipulates Aristotle‘s basic elements of drama namely plot,
character, diction, spectacle, thought and melody. Dance, song and music are
154
smoothly conjoined not merely to entertain or to amuse, but to communicate a
complexity of black experience.
Shange uses the notion of Greek chorus in for colored girls..., spell # 7, boogie
woogie landscape and From Okra to Greens she insist the significance of the unison.
Chorus originates from the plays of classical Greece. The plays of ancient greek
theatre always included a chorus that offered a variety of background. The chorus
expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as the hidden
fears, secrets and mental ability which is similar to that of the night life companions in
boogie woogie landscape. One of the best example of the drama that has clearly
instituted the role of chorus is the Murder in the cathedral (1935) by T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965). In all these four plays all the characters join together at the end as in the
Greek chorus and sing the positive aroma of life.
In for colored girls...… all the ladies join hands together and form a circle to
chant their finding of at the end of the rainbow. In spell # 7 at the end of the play lou
signals the other characters to join him for the serious celebration. In the boogie
woogie landscape the night life companions come to life and join with layla for the
holistic chant . In From Okra to Greens the five dancers play the role of chorus
joining with the protagonists at every part of the play.
Shange expects her choreopoem, to be a new theatrical choice, to be as
effective as music and seeks for a musical value contributing its audience a reverie of
the type normally relayed during a musical presentation. She suggests in her lost in
language in sound
…we demolish the notion of straight theatre for decade or so. refuse to
allow playwrights to work without dancers and musicians/ ‗coon‘
shows were somebody else‘s idea/ we have integrated the notion that
155
drama must be words/ with no music & no dance/ cuz that wd take
chuckles & scoffs at the notion that all niggers cd sing & dance/ &
most of us can sing & dance/ … this is a cultural reality. this is why i
find the most inspiring theatre among us to be in the realms of music &
dance. (15)
Shange‘s specification of the task for music and dance is related to the role of
both in African traditional performance. Ethel Pitts Walker a contemporary socialist,
recapitulates this role when she states that,
…the complete integration of acting, music, and dance demonstrated
how African theatre involves more than once creative art form… the
actors would begin singing and dancing, usually inviting the audience
to participate. ( 14)
Even though slavery was abolished, the African Americans remained
backward financially. As remained in poverty, they enjoyed only a second-class
citizenship during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This suffering led rise to the
African-American music form known as the blues. The ‗work songs‘ and ‗field
hollers‘ sung by slaves on the plantations paved the way for blues music. The blues is
known for its brutally honest depiction of everyday life. Popular blues topics include
sex, drinking, railroads, poverty, labour and unrequited love. The blues continues in
the ―call-and-response‖ pattern. The form is rhythm-centered. It focuses on a beat and
includes flattened notes or blue notes.
Blue notes are a part of African American music that was famous in the
eighteenth century. Blue notes are relatively emotional and are related to traditional
African work songs. This style generally places more importance on words than on
instruments. Instruments commonly used in blues music include the guitar, banjo,
156
piano and harmonica. The powerful voices of the blue singers support in the pains and
heartaches of life. Popular blues singers include B.B. King, Bessie Smith and Ma
Rainey
Crazy Blues. St Louis Blues. Rhapsody in Blue. Blues for Mister
Charlie. Blue Moon. Blue Light. What did I do to be so black and
blue? The Bluest Eye. Kind of Blue. Reservation Blues. My Blue
Heaven. Blue Note. China Blue. The blues offers a pervasive and
familiar resource of images, sounds, idioms and moods.(Omry, 27)
In Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American
Literature & Film (2009) the author informs that
Brown and Hughes were among the first poets to incorporate blues
form techniquees and diction (plus what brown called ―blues feeling‖)
into their work there by collapsing distinctions between so called high
and low culture that ultimately derived from Europe.(2,3)
The blues were employed through a whole gamut of modern drama and fiction by
authours like Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, Xam Wilson, Cartier, Leon Forrest, Gayl
Jones, Nathaniel Mackey, Clarence Major, Paule Marshall, Albert Murray,
J.I.Phillips, Ntozake Shange and John Edgar Widemen.
Shange has incorporated this music form in most of her works to express the
sorrows and pains of her chatacters. The post World War II episode in spell # 7 that
brings out the story of the famous commando Muhammad ali is sung in ―a catchy
untempo rhythms & blues.‖
The jazz an African American music form developed on the heels of the blues.
Unlike the blues, jazz music was meant to be danced to. Jazz reached the height of its
popularity during a period called the "Roaring 20s" when the mood of the day was
157
more upbeat. This new mood was reflected with the composition of quick-tempo
music of jazz. Along with the inclusion of lyrics and utilization of the ―call-andresponse‖ style, jazz music places a heavier emphasis on instruments. Popular jazz
instruments are the saxophone, trumpet, piano and the drums.
The term jazz, whether referring to a musical style, a cultural
phenomenon, an historical period, or a political and social feature,
resists any simple definition. The name has been used in innumerably
various ways: from the defining term of a very specific musical style
within a particular geographical and historical moment, to a board,
even rhetorical, conceptualization of culture that crosses centuries and
oceans. (Omry, 4)
Jazz music developed during a time when African Americans were more
concerned with being accepted by mainstream American culture than connecting with
their African heritage. As a result, jazz was ultimately more closely linked to
European music in style than to African music. Jazz music was born in New Orleans,
Louisiana. It resulted from a fusion of the different musical styles that coexisted in the
city including folk music, brass bands and ragtime. Popular jazz musicians include
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.
Shange‘s for colored girls...…, exhibits the personal empowerment conveyed
through dance, and may be discussed in terms of drama, the series of poems that
comprise the script calls for an analysis of the work as jazz literature. Perhaps the
most evident qualification of this work as jazz literature, is Shange‘s rejection of
standard form and invention of an artistic expression of identity. In her essay
‗Contemporary African American Women Writers,‘ Dana A. Williams indicates the
way in which ―we see Shange‘s artful escape of boundaries and her exploration and
158
rewriting of form, two features that are among her greatest contributions to black
women‘s writing‖ (74). Similarly, jazz music, from its very initial stages as blues and
work songs, has evolved through an ―escape from boundaries‖ and a creation of its
own form and standards.
Shange‘s resistance to conformity in for colored girls... may be seen in both
the structure of her dramatic script, and the poetry that composes it. Specifically, the
search for identity within these features reveals Shange‘s originality. The presentation
of the script through poetry avoids complying with standard dramatic form, offering
itself as an individualized expression for each of the ladies while also baring the
corresponding attributes of Shange‘s writing and the jazz idiom; a feature which
elucidates this work as jazz literature.
The likeness between the author‘s inventive form and the characteristics of
jazz music renders for colored girls... as a work of jazz literature, one that arouses a
multiculturalist sentiment through the seven ladies‘ self-searching. This sentiment is
especially demonstrated through Shange‘s experimenting ―with kinship along feminist
lines‖ (Cooke, 111). Additionally, Shange‘s overlook of dramatic and poetic norms in
this work provide reason to consider for colored girls... ―more American than white
literature, given [white America‘s] traditional use of European forms and need for
European approval‖ (Boan, 105). Corey Michael Taylor elaborates Ellison‘s view on
blues and jazz as follow:
Ellison formulates a conception of the blues that highlights their
musical and exta-musical qualities. The blue are both a mental
―impulse‖ to recogonize the ―brutal experience‖ of slavery and its farreaching consequences, and an active skill (―to finger its jagged grain‖)
that allows an individual ―to transcend‖ history and recast the
159
relationship between inner (personal, mental) and outer (social,
political) worlds. The creation of an everyday reality involves
engaging with the blues and / or jazz to comment upon social
conditions one‘s inner state. (217)
Wilder‘s summarises that the art of jazz construction is neither singular nor
extradinoary. It is the musicians, critics, and musicologists, all resort constantly and
recurrently to language metaphors when they converse the art of jazz. Solos of jazz
tell a story, performances are musical conversations and youngsters are admonished to
say something with their instruments instead of playing notes.
One of the principles used to justify slavery was that Africans were uncivilized
and pagan. In an effort to convert Africans to Christianity and to "save their souls,"
slave owners made their slaves learn the Bible and attend church services.
Nevertheless, African American church services remained segregated from white
services. As a result, African American congregations developed a unique style of
hymns that would later evolve into gospel music.
Gospel music descended from the original spirituals songs of slaves on
plantations. Songs such as ―Go Down Moses,‖ ―When the Saints Go Marching In‖
and ―Swing Low Sweet Chariot‖ included messages of hope, anger and anguish. ―Go
down Moses‖ by William Faulkner is an American Negro spiritual that describes
events in the Old Testament of the Bible, specifically Exodus 7:26: ―And the Lord
spoke unto Moses, go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, thus saith the Lord, Let my
people go, that they may serve me‖, in which God commands Moses to demand the
release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. In the song ‗Israel‘ stands for the
African-American slaves where ‗Egypt‘ and ‗Pharaoh‘ represent the slavemaster.
―When the Saints Go Marching In,‖ often referred to as ―The Saints,‖ is an American
160
gospel hymn under the aspects of folk music. The precise origins of the song are not
known. ―Swing Low Sweet Chariot‖ is a historic American Negro spiritual.
Oklahoma proposed a bill nominating ―Swing Low, Sweet Chariot‖ as the Oklahoma
State official gospel song in 2011.
Like the blues and jazz, gospel music also included the African ―call-andresponse‖ format. Gospel music utilizes instruments such as the piano and the organ,
and includes the use of choirs. In 2009, the African American church continues to be
a significant cornerstone of the African American community and Gospel music has
grown to achieve worldwide popularity.
Maya Angelou in her Mom & Me & Mom (2013) narrates how her
grandmother would play piano and train her children sing gospel songs.
Grandmother Baxter played piano in the Baptist church and she liked
to hear her children sing spiritual gospel songs. She would fill a cooler
with Budweiser and stack bricks of ice cream n the refrigerator.The
same rough Bater men led by their fierce older sister would harmonize
in the kitchen on ―Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross‖:…The Baxters were
proud of their ability to sing. (5)
Shange points out the importance of the gospel in her play for colored girls...… when
she makes the ‗lady in brown‘ utter
sing the song of her possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
& handled warmly.(5)
161
In spite of these varied types of gospels and chants Shange has also
incorporated the term ‗music‘ with the general sense throughout the plays taken for
study. Though the different types of music are used to express the mood and mental
state of characters, this generalized music form is used to gather the attention of the
audience and is played when the characters come on the stage or exit, to make
notification on the beginning and the end of the interval and at curtain calls. Shange
in her poem I Live in Music (1994) expresses her love for music.
i live in music
live in it
wash in it
i cd even smell it
wear sound on my fingers
sound falls so fulla music
ya cd make a river where yr arm is &
hold yrself
hold yrself in a music (17-25).
Chant is a crucial dramaturgical and poetic feature of Shange‘s oeuvre.
Kimberly Benston sees Shange's and other African-American women writers' use of
chant in theatre and poetry as a ―movement away from European-American structures
and toward African-rooted ones in terms of the shift from mimesis/drama to
methexis/ritual‖(85)
The chant ritual is one of the primary verse techniques that Shange uses in all
the plays except a photograph: lovers in motion to achieve a liberating rhetorical selfdefinition. In for colored girls...… the poem ―no more love poems #4‖ provides each
of the different colored ladies to involve in chant. The ladies respond to the lady in
162
yellow's lament that her love is ‗too delicate to have thrown back on my face‘ (45).
The repetitive responses of the ladies modify this phrase, while each adds her own
adjective to build on ‗delicate‘:
everyone (but started by the „lady in brown‟)
and beautiful
and beautiful
and beautiful
everyone (but started by the „lady in purple‟)
oh sanctified
oh sanctified
oh sanctified (48)
the climax chanting in for colored girls...… ―i found god in myself & i loved her/
fiercely‖ is a feminist ritual.
In for spell # 7 as lou indicates all the character come together to form a circle
and chant ―colored & love it/ love it bein colored‖ a communal rictual. In boogie
woogie landscape layla utters
I want to tell you I cannot stop smoking kools/ forget the militia in
panama/ all brown & bald in Gestapo boots/ dontcha wanna be music /
& ease into the fog dontcha wanna be like rain/ a comic event/ like
sound…. (BW. p142)
In From Okra to Greens, Okra chants in French the song of liberation for
which the chorus dance.
In each play the chant continues on with each getting a turn and an opportunity
to lead the chorus, thereby transforming each character into an artist figure, who
achieves self-expression in her ability to verbalise her experience. Additionally, the
163
chant form unites the ladies in their agony, initiating a cathartic process by which they
release themselves from the pain of their love relationships while rhetorically
liberating themselves of the oppressive tradition of the genre of love poetry.
This chanting episode in the plays of Shange could be paralled with flyin‟
West of Pearl Cleage where the women conspire to eliminate a physically abusive
husband through the expert conjuring of food preparation. Before the dramatic
decision is reached the woman form circles had start for the ritual and chant
Fan and Minnie.
Because we are free Negro women… Sophie. Born of free Negro
women…
both (fan and Minnie).
Back as far as time begin… Sophie. We choose this day to declare our
lives to be our own and no one else‘s … and went west together to be
free women as a sacred between us with all our trust … and all our
strength … and all our courage … and all our love. (63)
Benston argues further that ‗not only does the ritual create a sense of
community, but it also breaks down the barriers that have traditionally existed
between the performers and the spectators‘ (53). Ritual not only allows Shange to
innovate rhetorically, thus removing her text from the hegemonic influence of EuroAmerican structures of conventional drama, but it also creates a sense of community
in the sharing of the characters awareness of pain and their feelings of dislocation.
Shange in her preface to Lost in Language & Sound explains that she has been
‗twirling & crooning through the placenta & the water I‘d yet to break‘ in her
mother‘s womb for all the nine months. Her parents were ‗quite light on their feet‘
and they were ‗taken with jazz, rhythm & blues, bebop, & the high life.‘ Whenever
164
and wherever the black people celebrated Shange‘s parents accompaned them. Her
mother also gifted her with poetry for her recited, by heart, Laurence Dunbar, Sterling
Brown and many others. Thus Shange was born a blessed child.
For Shange music and dance were very powerful forces of religion, apart from
being theatrical and political. They normally elucidate and keep hold of the sacred and
primitive well-being of black people inside and outside America. The belief of the
African-based tradition is what Shange exhibits in her usage of dance, music, poetry,
and ceremony. Like many other African writers, Shange also visualizes her home land
as the incarnation of a bond system connecting Africans and African-Americans.
Shange refers to Africa as a isolated but accessible homeland and source of selfhood
on blowing up a stability of cultures from Africa to black America.
On referring to the characterstics of the African dance the African American
writer Kariamu Welsh-Asante states
African dance forms are strong, virile and vital with a feeling of
dynamic thrust and resistance. They are exceedingly controlled, having
the power to project the gentle wind or the raging atrom. Raging from
walk and its variations, the techniques of the African dance embrace
the leap, the hop, the skip, the jumps, falls of all descriptions and turns
which balance the dancer at the most precarious angles with the
ground.(5)
Dance is the spirit of life for the Africans. Dance is a magic that converts their
body into a form of liquefied steel. The dance make their body fly without wings and
make a dump sing. Dance educates them. The African dance has an urgency of
direction and purpose that is to communicate. The Africans use their body as tool
165
through which they contemplate every imaginable emotions and events. For the
Africans dance is life.
The subject matter of African dance is all inclusive of every activity
between birth and death- the seed which trembles to be born- the first
breath of life- the growth, the struggle for existence- the reaching
beyond the every day into the realm of the Soul- the glimpsing of the
Great Divine- the ecstasy and the sorrow which is life, and then the
path back to the Earth. This is the dance! (Welsh-Asante, 6)
Shange has made use of dances of various cultures. In for colored girls… and
boogie woogie landscape she has used the American dance patterns that developed in
1960s. In From Okra to Green she concentrated on various African tribal dances,
ritual dances and the Arabian dance patterns. Waxman suggests that Shange‘s use of
dance in for colored girls… purports ―to unify the stories of these women and to help
the to went out their despair and isolation‖ (99). The mix-up of and the experiment of
the Africans with Americans in dance forms is to create a relationship between the
two continents. ―Their focus is the African/ African American connection‖
(Gottschild, 2).
The famous dances in the sixties demonstrated the fun and high-spirited
energy of the decade. These dances were often associated with a song and in some
cases the lyrics instructed listeners how to perform the dance. the most popular dances
of America is those developed in the 60s were cakewalk, black bottom, charleston,
swing dance, lindyhop, twist, the madison, jerk, mashed potato, watusi, bougaloo, the
dog, pony, the bump, poppin&lockin, Bus stop, double dutch, breakdancing,
clowing/krumping, souljaboy, bankhead bounce, crip walk, Freddie, Frug, HitchHike, Loco-motion etc.,
166
In for colored girls... all the ladies join together to dance at the end of the
prologue. They hear the song ‗Dancing in the Streets‘ sung at the background by the
famous music troops the sixties namely Martha and the Vandellas . The lady in green,
the lady in blue and the lady in yellow dances to the song adapting the American
dance pattern of the pony, the big boss line, the swim and the nose dive.
The Pony was a popular dance in the 1960s. The dance is like that of a horse
dance. In the dance the feet are kept comfortably together, while various arm and
hand motions are possible.
PLATE V
Steps in pony dance.
www.americandance.com
167
PLATE VI
Pony dance to warm up
www.americandance.com
Another form of dance popularized in the 1960s, the Swim mimics the
motions of swimming. The Swim is closely related to another type of dance namely
the Twist where movements are done by keeping the legs in opposite direction. The
basic dance of the swim combines the lower body movement of dances like the Twist
and the Pony with arm and hand motions that resemble swim strokes.
168
PLATE VII
The swim dance movement
www.americandance.com
Traditional dance in Africa expresses the life of the community more than that
of individuals or couples. Early critics commented on couple dancing for such
dancing was thought immoral in many traditional African societies. In all African
dances there seems to be no evidence for sustained, one-to-one male-female
partnering anywhere before the late colonial era.
African dances teach social patterns and values and help people work, mature,
praise or criticize members of the community while celebrating festivals and funerals,
competing, reciting history, proverbs and poetry; and to encounter gods. African
dances are largely participatory, with spectators being part of the performance. With
the exception of some spiritual, religious or initiation dances, there are traditionally no
barriers between dancers and onlookers. Even ritual dances often have a time when
spectators participate.
169
In From Okra to Green… Shange has utilized this traditional African dance as
dance of celebration in the very opening of the poem. She borrows the movements for
this from the Ashanti, Yoruba and Ewe tribes. These tribes possess their own empire
in Ghana and Nigeria. Asaadua is the name of the dance of the Ashanti tribes.
Asaadua was once a popular recreational musical type among the Akan people of
Ghana.
The only partner dance associated with African dances would be the Bottle
Dance of the Mankon People in the Northwest Region of Cameroon or the Assiko
from the Douala people that involves interaction of Man and Woman and the way that
they charm each other.
PLATE VIII
Ashanti tribes‘ cultural dance.
www.africantribaldance.com
Emphasizing individual talent, Yoruba dancers express communal desires,
values, and collective creativity. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing
gender roles in children and other community structures such as kinship, age and
170
status are also often reinforced. Many dances are performed by only males or females,
indicating strong beliefs about what being male or female means and some strict
taboos about interaction. For the Yoruba touching while dancing is not common
except in special circumstances. Dances celebrate the passage from childhood to
adulthood or spiritual worship
Master dancers are particular about the learning of the dance exactly as they
are taught. Children must learn the dance exactly as taught without variation.
Improvisation or a new variation comes only after mastering the dance, performing,
and receiving the appreciation of spectators and the sanction of village elders.
PLATE XI
Yoruba tribal dance.
www.africantribaldance.com
171
PLATE X
The position of legs in the Yoruba tribal dance
www.africantribaldance.com
PLATE XI
The ewe dance movements are made mostly in a circle form.
www.africantribaldance.com
172
The Ewe has an intricate collection of dances, which vary between
geographical regions and other factors. The Adevu is a professional dance that
celebrates the hunter. the Agbadza, is traditionally a war dance. The Atsia dance is
performed mostly by women is a series of stylistic movements. Agahu is both the
name of a dance and of one the many secular music associations of the Ewe people.
Tro-u is ancestral drum music that is played to invite ancestors to special sacred
occasions at a shrine.
Fig 4
The empires of Ashanti, Yoruba and Ewe.
www.africanmap.com
The African American Vernacular dance travelled from the ship to minstrel
shows to the mainstream and took off during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's.
Shange uses this vernacular black dance steps to make fool of greens in From Okra to
Green.
173
PLATE XII
The vernacular black dance
www.americandance.com
The traditional Arabian dance is mostly done by the women when they are
together with other women mostly for the fun of it, for the expression of joy. Belly
Dance is a type of Arabian ritual dance that has been used throughout generations for
marking the ceremonies of life and celebrating community.
Belly Dance features in every wedding. Along with the professional belly
dancer who entertains the guests, the women and men of the two families would enjoy
a dance together as well. Dances are also done on other rituals like child birth and
other common gatherings. Traditional belly dance is essentially spiritual movement.
174
The dance involves the belly dancer sending out good wishes and blessings to the
audience, through her finger motions.
This dance is done by the dancers in From Okra to Greens who perform the
dance by rounding up the couple. Shange must have incorporated this dance for the
couple to be blessed.
PLATE XIII
The traditional Arabian belly dance
www.arabiandance.com
175
Adagio is a type of aerobics. The duet performance of partner acrobalance
poses an associated movement that involves stationary balances by a pair of
performers. Adagio is performed in professional circus, in various dance disciplines
including acro dance and ballet, in pair skating, and as a hobby in university circus
groups. Shange uses this dance technique for the reconciliation of greens and Okra.
After Greens has deceived layla of being dishonest he realizes that he has hurt her. He
comes back to her to console her. It is here the two exhibit their reconciliation through
the adagio dance.
PLATE XIV
Adagio swan, performed by an acro dance duo
www.americandance.com
176
Dance for Shange, like music, serves as a therapeutic agent, a defense
mechanism, apart from keeping hold of ties with Africa. On recalling her dance
training in San Francisco, Shange articulates in the preface of for colored girls...…
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 women & as a poet. The
freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat a perfection
that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem
to me, my body &bind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my
life…. insisted that everything African, everything halfway colloquial,
a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine. (xi)
Shange believes that the ‗interdisciplinary culture‘ of black Americans call
upon a theatre of ‗more than verbal communication,‘ one that demands to all the
‗physical senses.‘ More radical than Baraka in this regard, Shange endorses the
rejection of conventional theatre practices to fully explore black music, dance, and
other nonverbal resources.
Shange‘s theatre aims at a ‗totality of being,‘ a theatre that equally defines her
as ‗composer-poet-performer.‘ She looks upon the artistic inclinations that ‗ancestral
oral traditions‘ offer, and for which Glenda Dickerson have been celebrated as black
―womanist‖ ―PraiseSinger‖ and ―guardian of the archetypes of her culture‘s collective
unconscious.‖ Shange ascribes to herself, in addition to relying on a versatile
configuration, the dramatic tools with which to emancipate and elevate the ordinary
African woman.
Shange uses language to bolster her theatrical liberty. She reconstructs the
usage of standard English. She neither uses a Black English or idiom comparable to
177
‗ebonics.‘ ebonics is a dialect of African American English. Shange employs a
colloquial, metaphoric, and rhythmic style of Black English that agrees with her
poetry. Significantly she deforms English intentionally by breaking away from
conventional spellings and pronunciations.
Unlike to Hansberry‘s Coffin, the black character in Drinking Ground who
speaks Black Southern English like a slave driver, Shange‘s lady in purple talks about
the impact of music and dance on her life. Her lines are rhythmically and thematically
separated by slashes, letters are not traditionally capitalized, and spelling distorted:
i lived wit myths & music waz my ol man & I cd dance outta time / a
dance wit no partners / take my pills & keep right on steppin / linger in
non-english speakin arms so there waz no possibility of
understandin (FC.I.i.p46)
John Russell rickford in his book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English says.
There is also some ―eye dialect‖ –spellings such as cdn‟t and
waz,which don‘t convey pronunciations different from ―couldn‘t‖ and
―was‖ but contribute to the impression of vernacular usage. The
parlance of black teenagers relays the narrotor‘s experience effectively.
But we must not overlook the connotation of the language…. (23)
Her poetic style is mimetic of the orality of contemporary American English
that evokes the ferociousness, intricacy, and intensity of American life. It is a
homogonous group performance technique used in plays. The performers comment
with the collective voice on the dramatic action summarise the information in the play
and help the audience follow the performance.Her choreopoems are polyphonic in
dramatic form that combines spoken, sung and chanted language accompanied with
body language to form a whole work of interaction.
178
As a poet, Shange is gifted to make her words bend to her commands.
Without warning She invades the reader‘s territorial space and emotional
consciousness and to read words as a visual dance across a printed page. She brings to
the stage the same poetic vision and stylistic command.
Shange‘s use of symbols throughout for colored girls..., specifically in the first
stanza , reinforces the issue of identity in poetic verse. By using symbols such as the
lady in brown‘s ‗voice,‘ the author illustrates each character‘s search for literal
identity through figurative speech.
Shange‘s implementation of irony in her language demonstrates gender
inequality towards the black woman. This recognition of a reality different from
appearance, is evidenced in exclusion of names for each of the seven characters who
are referred to only as ―lady‖ (Harmon and Holman, 258). As Cheryl Clarke points
out in “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, the denomination
of ―lady,‖ is a ―designation of gentility historically denied [to] black women‖ (100).
Shange ignores that discrimination by ironically naming seven poor, beaten, and
tattered black women as black ladies. By operating the outside of the perceived
contextual norm of the story– that the women are lowlier than ―ladies‖ and have lived
a life not deserving of the term– Shange uses the names as an allusion to the
characters ‗defiance of discernment.‘ This irony plays out in the performance as each
woman who overcomes her subjugated role as society‘s lower class. Ultimately, the
use of the word ―lady‖ lends itself to Shange‘s artful disposition to resist conformity.
Introducing mimetic of the orality of contemporary American English in her
poetic style Shange evokes the aggressiveness, complexity, and intensity of American
life. Orality is provided by spellings that resemble pre-school ‗sounding out‘.
calligraphic page lay-outs and through upper-cast lines she expresses emotions
179
through the plays. Lower -case letters undermine idelological constructs an example
is the phallic image of the English first person pronoun spelled ―i‖ that could be
traced throughtout in all the five plays. Slashes in the verse line mark rhythms of
physical aggression and verbal seduction.
Shange‘s English, though not essentially a ―black‖ vernacular it is a unique
‗Shange construct‘ that authenticates ―her cultural, dramatic, and feminist self.‖
Having belief on this modernization to the elimination of everyday English, she
liberates herself, psychologically, from the ‗language of her oppressor,‘ after the
production of spell # 7 in 1979, Shange responded to a New York reviewer who
claimed that she had done the English language much damage:
The man who thought i wrote with intentions of outdoing the white
man in the acrobatic distortions of English waz absolutely correct, i
cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack
deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in …
being an afro-american writer is something to be self-conscious abt/
&yes/ … i haveta fix my tool to my needs/… so that the malignancies/
fall away/ leaving us space to literally create our own image. (1981.
Foreword, Three Pieces, xii)
Shange accomplished in relating a wide range of themes with her chosen ‗language.‘
Summarizing these themes, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory mentions
hypocrisy, racism, women's self-effacement, societal constraints on
women-particularly black women-infidelity, interconnectedness of
people of color, media misrepresentation of blacks, shoddy treatment
of black theater artists, black middle-class values and pressures, and
black spirit of survival. (42)
180
Traditionally, Africans have been revered as good storytellers, as have most
past and present peoples around the world who are rooted in oral cultures and
traditions. Ancient writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but most
Africans today, as in the past, are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral
rather than literary. In contrast to written ‗literature,‘ African ‗orature‘ is orally
composed and transmitted, and often created to be verbally and communally
performed as an integral part of dance and music. The Oral Arts of Africa are rich and
varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and they remain living
traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today.
Shange to uses the art of storytelling in her works with the help of monologue.
The Newyork Times criticizes her for her ability of telling story as ―Miss Shange is
superb story teller who keeps her eyes on what brings her characters together rather
than what separates them…‖. The story of crystal and beau willie brown episode in
for colored girls...… and the story of seau jean in spell # 7 not only create sympathy
for them but also serves as an best example of Shange‘s art of story telling. Story
telling is also used by Shange in the mode of flaskback.
Shange applied any possible techniques and body languages in Spell # 7 to
depict the experiences of African-Americans. The play not only discloses the
distortion of the black image, but also demonstrates the colorful spiritual world of the
black. One of the most effective techniques is the application of masks. The huge
black-face mask hung from the ceiling and the minstrel masks wore by actors and
actress enable the play to be developed in multi-narrative structure and more profound
implied meaning.
Blackface or the minstrel mask is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel
shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a
181
black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed
to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the ‗happy-go-lucky darky on the
plantation‘ or the ‗dandified coon.‘
In 1848, blackface minstrel shows were an American national art of the time,
translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience. Early in
the 20th century, blackface branched off from the minstrel show and became a form
in its own right, until it ended in the United States with the U.S. Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s. The function of the minstrel mask, the ―black-faced figure of
white fun,‖ were ―to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced to a sign, and to
repress the white audience‘s awareness of its moral identification with its own acts
and with the human ambiguities pushed behind the mask‖ (Elision 421).
Theater drapes and stage curtains are large pieces of cloth that are designed to
cover backstage areas of a theatre from spectators. They are designed for a variety of
specific purposes and come in several types. Many are made from black or other dark
colored, light-absorbing material, and heavyweight velour is the current industry
standard for these.
Shange uses backdrops in spell # 7 and From Okra to Greens. In spell # 7 a
minstrel mask is foregrounded at various significant levels. As a backdrop the huge
face mask is suspended at the center of the stage that encourages an immediate
response from an audience. The presence of the back drop with the picture of the face
mask engages the audience emotionally, intellectually, historically and
psychologically. In From Okra to Greens the stage bares only a ‗highly textured and
vibrant backdrop‘ that booms of the empires of African and the Aztec.
182
PLATE XV
The backdrop in spell # 7
Source from the title page of the text
Shange technical traits as a poet is established with the titles she provides for
her plays. Her attentiveness to words as a poet and the ability of the words to
communicate specific cultural realties are also exhibited in the titles of her works. In
for colored girls...… her use of the word ―color‖ and the symbolic representation of
the word ―rainbow‖ gathers attention to the title. When Shange speaks about the title
of for colored girls...… she says
I used the word ―colored girls‖ in the title [because] my grandmother
would understand. It wouldn‘t put her off and turn her away. I wnted to
get back to the brass tacks of myself as a child;I was a regular colored
girl, with a family that was good to men. (New Yorker Times,19)
She further explains in another interview:
i use the terms ―colored,‖ ―yellow‖ ―negress‖ & any other i can think
of cuz have a reality for me that extends beyond governments &
territories. i have always being referred to as an American citizen/ tho i
have the western hemisphere. In the colloquial terms referring to black
183
people is more history & love & acceptance of our ―peculiar situation‖
than in the cursory description of someone as ―black‖ or ―afroAmerican‖ which seem artificial to me. i cannot sustain myself with
inadequate language; that leads to superficial & ambiguous living. (70)
In the next play spell # 7 the word ―spell‖ represents black magic, the
traditional African American culture. Shange has used the modern version of
representing the word ―number‖ by its symbol ―#‖. The number 7 has a spiritual
significance for African Americans. It is a holy number as represented in the Bible.
God created the world in seven days and many other examples go such to identify
number 7 as a holy number in Christianity. Apart from that rainbow has seven colours
and the seven Swaras in the Carnatic music all relate to spiritual significance of the
number.
In the next play a photograph; lovers in motion Shange brings out the
importance of photograph the closest medium of poetry for her. On expressing the
nature of photograph Quandra Prettyman says
The picture is not real.
Still, neither is the word.
But the eyes makes pictures,
The mouth words,
Pressing order
Where none is. (259)
boogie woogie landscape is about the boogie woogie music a style of jazz
piano playing characterized by the steady rhythmic and melodic pattern, which
describes both the musical atmosphere of the drama. The work play a kind of
improvised jazz accompaniment. ‗landscapes‘ is the term Shange uses to signify the
184
gender and the race region of Layla‘s social and psychological existence.
Landscaping is a human means of ordering natural environment. Landscapes are
created and there are there by unnatural. They are also ever-changing and constantly
in need of care and attention to maintain a landscaper‘s ideal of order. Layla‘s
response to and the social manifestations of racism and sexism that impacts upon her
identity are as ever-changing as are the emotional physical and cultural landscape.
The next work From Okra to Greens brings out Shanges interest in ecology
and also proves her as an ecofeminist. Okra‘s are lady‘s finger and greens stands for
leafy vegetables. The play was first produced at The Kitchen in New York City under
the title Mouths.
Stream of Consciousness is a literary style in which the author follows visual,
auditory, tactile, associative, and subliminal impressions and expresses them using
‗interior monologue‘ of characters either as a writing technique or as a writing style
that mingles thoughts and impressions in an illogical order, and violates grammar
norms.
The phrase ―stream of consciousness‖ was first used in 1890 by William
James in his Principles of Psychology. In literature it records the character's feelings
and thoughts through stream of consciousness in attempt to capture all the external
and internal forces that influence their psychology at a single moment. Any logical or
sequential approach is disregarded.
In the play Death of the Salesman (1949) Arthur Miller (1915-2005) an
American playwright and essayist presents legitimately the transparency of the setting
that effectively puts forward the psychological drama of the protagonist Willy Loman
in a stream-of-consciousness technique.
185
An American playwright and screenwriter, and an actor Samm-Art
Williams‘Last of the Line (2011) is another example of the African American drama
that bursts with comedy, suspense, candor, laughter and regret, as the descendants of
African-American slaveholders and their ancestors take center stage. Narrated in a
stream of consciousness tenor, the play flashes back from 2005 to the years 1845–75
in a story that tests loyalties and histories, and forces the modern day characters to
examine their own identities in relation to power, resources and ―blood money.‖
Shange proves her talent for words in her choreopoems for colored girls...…,
spell # 7 and boogie woogie landscape in which the artist‘s stream-of-consciousness
technique gets a boots from the lexicon and the unique words of African American
English. In for colored girls… the consciousness of the ‗lady in yellow‘ is exhibited
when she thinks of
i got drunk & cdnt figure out
whose hand was on my thigh / but it didn‘t matter
cuz these cousins martin eddie Sammy Jerome &boody
waz my sweetheats alternately since the seventh grade
& everybody knew I always started cryin if somebody actually
tried to take advantage of me
At jacqui‘s
……….
Seems like Sheila & marguerite waz afraid
to get their hair turnin back
so they laid up against the wall
lookin almost sexy
didn‘t wanna sweat
186
but me & my fellas
we waz dancing..(FC. p8 )
In spell # 7 the long narration of lily of her dream to become white brings out
her consciousness of white in a stream pattern where she pours out the activities of the
whites in a non-stop pattern.
i dream of chaka khan/ chocolate from graham central station with all
seven wigs/ & medusa. i brush & brush. i use olive oil hair food/ &
posner‘s vitamin E. but mostly i brush & brush. i may lose contact with
most of my friends. i cd lose my job/….(SP I. ii.p26)
In boogie woogie landscape Layla is carried over by the thought of her mother
and siblings in spite of her engagement in work. She recalls her relations in every part
of her work that leads to a psychological turmoil that she could bare and which pushes
her into the bed. With the seemingly stream of consciousness presentation Shange sets
the play at night conventionally associated with mystery, confusion and even evil. In
layla‘s bedroom as layla dances. Sleeps-a time when she is most physically vulnerable
and consciously unaware and dreams when her thoughts spontaneously overflow. As
the real landscape in the play lies with in the head of layla her mental process that
includes consciousness and unconsciousness cultivates out of a hostile settings of race
and gender which is relayed in stream of consciousness succession.
Flashback could be defined as an experience of an individual that pop into
ones awareness ‗without any conscious, premeditated attempt to search and retrieve
this memory‘. Every individual possess a memory system that is divided on the way
of its development as voluntary (conscious) and involuntary (unconscious), that
function autonomously. As the involuntary recurrent memories are elusive in nature,
187
very little is known about the subjective experience of flashbacks. However flashback
is used by literarians in vast mode.
In literature flashback are scenes those that take back the story from the
current scene to some incident that occurred in the past and makes the reader know
the history, or place or past events that defines the present state or action of the
characters. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the
narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to before the narrative started.
. Another early use of this device could be traced in ―The Three Apples‖, an
Arabian Nights tale. Flashbacks are also employed in several other Arabian Nights
tales such as ―Sinbad the Sailor‖ and ―The City of Brass‖. If flashbacks are presented
non-chronologically it can be ambiguous to the story: An example of this is
Slaughterhouse-Five where the narrative jumps back and forth in time, so there is no
actual present time line. The Harry Potter series employs a magical device called a
Pensieve, which changes the nature of flashbacks from a mere narrative device to an
event directly experienced by the characters, which are able to provide commentary.
Shange uses this technique to explain the story of Fay in a flash back narrated
by ross and acted out by ross and maxine as car drivers and fay respectively
scrutinizes issues concerning the conditions of black female artists. Fay, a Brooklyn
wife, exemplifies black female performers who submit to stereotypes, even though
she is not a prostitute and simply enjoys a night out on the town. Bettina condemns
fay‘s conformity and tells her, ―yr not playin a whore/ if some other woman comes in
her & tells me she‘s playin a wholre/ i think I might kill her‖ (SP.I.i.23). fay‘s arrival
in a bar where actors hang out—much like the artist‘s domain in spell # 7—ties her
story in with the ongoing experience of the cast.
188
The choreograph of the circle of bodies visually represent a circular structure
of the entire dramatic work. While the women answer the ‗lady in brown‘s‘ call to
―sing a black girls song,‖ in the final moments Shange gradually transforms the ladies
to lay hands on the ‗lady in red‘ by handling her like a new born to heal her emotional
and physical pain.
Visuals play a prominent role in the theatrical tradition .The aesthetics of a
play is affected by the society or time it represents. Appearance matter if they are
constructed to deliver a sociological image. African American theratrical tradition are
especially important for the visuals. The often times political, rhetoric and theatre of
the 1970‘s in America were linked with motivation. Just as Amiri Baraka in his
Dutch man a created an inextricable link to Black Nationalism. Black female
playwrights broke new grounds in 1970‘s that vocalized the plight of black women in
politics and the arts
Ntozake Shange creates and aesthetics in all the five plays that uplifted black
women from despair .The visual elements of Shange off-Broadway production
reflects a changing dynamic in black feminism. The bright colours ,Crimson, Hotpink,
Vermillion in the play for colored girls… brought out the ‗turmoil in politics‘ of the
piece. (Allen 254)
Shange has invented a creating of self through dance having understood and
loved her body Shange realized that other black women too must feel empowered.
Visual choices in Shange‘s plays creates a new order of black female beauty, as Alice
walker endeavor to achieve through her writings.
The community of African Amercians clothings have always been a form of
visual rebellion. ―the zoot suit riots stemmed from African-American and MexicanAmerican youths snubbing world war 2 clothing rations and tailoring lengthy suits‖
189
(whites 251). Clothes can create a deliberate deviation from stereotypes. The
Africans were rebellions against the straight European hair style that has been cleared
depicted by Shange in spell # 7.
Shange wrote her first play for colored girls… to raise voice in favour of the
voiceless. The voiceless in this scenario refer to the African-american women who
acknowledge their neighbourhood block to be their own prison cell. Shange wanted
the choreo poem to be a mixture of poetry and dance, a play structure completely
against the Europeans. Europeans of an exposition, rising action and climax. There is
a fluctuation between first and brutal rape in the poem. The women deal with the
serious issues in a matter-of-fact fashion, on the other hand they searched solution to
their tradegies. That finally find solution through self love.
The process of creating for colored girls… had been exclamatorily an
interesting collaboration that shades light on the importance of the rituals. The origin
of the poem is at San Francisco bar. It was picked up by the producer Harold prince
and directed by off-broadway by Oz Scott in 1976. The very look of the show had
altered the text. Shange has already been working closely with the costume designer,
Judy Dearing as well as set designer and real life sister, Ifa Bayeza, whom were also
dancers. These three black women stressed their visual concepts to director Oz Scott.
When Oz Scott wanted a cluttered set with a realistic kitchen, bathroom and living
room, Bayeza explained him that for the choreography to flourish there had to be
space and not clutter. Ifa and Shage insisted on a monochromatic look that is to
appear to have only one colour dress with a low budget dearing bought crepe-back
silk dresses in the saturated hues of the rainbow. The design process worked
organically with the play. ―it was actually this discussion that led the unnamed
women to be named after their dresses‖ (Bayeza).
190
The rainbow as a literary service to signify self-worth. The barefoot and
colorful nature of the 1976 costumes provided the women to discover their inner
beauty through nature. When the women in bright colour were dedicated more
youthful passionate poems, the darker colour were tales of ―frustration and despair‖
(EI Shayal 365)
PLATE XVI
Ntozake Shange, left, and Ifa Bayeza.
www.newyorktimes.com
Okra‘s physical movements and contortions vivify the image Greens sets
before us:
the woman dont stand up
straight
aint never stood up
straight/ always bent
some which a way
crooked turned abt
slanted sorta toward
191
a shadow of herself (8).
Greens‘ tone implies that this black woman could stand straight if she wanted.
He does not say that the woman can not stand up If she accepts her own
powerlessness, then perhaps Greens' cynical tone is his attempt to spur the ‗crooked‘
woman into positive self-awareness. On commenting on the choreography of colored
girls actor-author Robbie Mc Cauley remarks
The form demands that the performer have an organic physical
relationship to the words and images of the poems/narratives… and, of
course, there is physical life in the text. The actor deals with inner
rhythms in giving voice to text. Shange‘s work demands that inner
rhythms be physicalized. And of course, each actor finds her own way
of doing this (qtd, in Lester 3).
Drama is not only distinguished from genres with the presence of the body on
stage it also affords possibilities of dramatic effects and critical analysis far beyond
the written words. The body movement on stage constitutes a text in and of itself with
breath, posture and gesture as a word being punctuated of a dramatic work so that
they are in some way embodied for the audience McIntyre a contemporary
choreographer with whom Shange has danced and collaborated on number of theatre
piece highlights the improvisational dimension of choreo poems
The uniqueness of the form as I know it and have worked with it, is
that the words are not separate over there and danced to. The words
and dance become one-interwined so you couldn‘t imagine one
without the other….. her words have the music and the dance in it and
the words also have space that is open for the dance (like abstract
192
music) whereas some other poetry may be so explicit that movement
with it is redundant (qtd in Lester 4)
PLATE XVII
Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre in an interview
http://vimeo.com
Shange presents religious and cultural values of the African Diaspora, through
her use of chanting, and various other forms of ritualized enactments, many of which
have traditionally not been seen as drama. The many facets of African American life
is incorporated by Shange in the theatrical arena to create a sensual experience that
she explains in one of her lost in language and sound…
the fact that we are an interdisciplinary culture/ that we understand
more than verbal communication/ lays a weight on Afro-American
wirters that few others are lucky enugh to have been born into. we can
use with some skill virtually all our physical senses/ as writers
committed to bringing the world as we remember it / imagine it and
know it to be that stage we must use everything we‘ve got. (16)
193
Shange ignores traditional boundries of the stage when she writes as a black
artist particularly about black people of their experiences, mannerisms, tastes, music,
dreams, fears and uses black language all towards demonstrating and documenting
the complexities of the black‘s exsistence and affording a fuller range of African
American experience.
Shange has carved for herself an enduring and classical place in American
theatre history. She has successfully expanded and redefined American theatre to
include the choreopoem as a satisfactory, legitimate dramatic form. Not only did she
generalise the choreopoem but she has brought to the Americans theatre an art that is
definitely African. Shange‘s choreopoems are comprised of chants, poetry, dance and
rituals in company with the traditional African theatrical expression of story-telling,
rhythm, physical movement and emotional catharsis.
The next chapter titled ‗conclusion‘ contains the extract of the introduction.
The important point discussedin all the main chapters are r recaped. The findsing are
also explained and the scope of study is also suggested.