March 15, 2013 | Theatre,

Remembrance

By Hana Sharif, Project Manager, Artists’ Ambassadors Project

“Come Home. Come. Come Home. To the truth of who we are….”

Some of my earliest memories are sitting at my grandmother’s feet listening to her weave a tapestry of adventures and exploits of her childhood. As she bandaged my knee, she regaled me with stories of medicine women and healers from bygone generations. As we watched the news, she shared the trauma my grandfather and his brothers endured as they helped integrate the city that would be my summer playground. Seamlessly, she cultivated the understanding that I am part of a continuum. There is no veil of separation between the past and the present. The future stands on the shoulders of those epic heroes and rides on the winds of their stories. Through her ringing laugh, bluesy song and lilting voice, I learned the personalities and history of all the women and men I have ever been.

There is a West African tradition that predates the written word. For more than two millennia, the history, heart, culture, dreams, triumphs and trials of a people have been meticulously documented through the body and voice of the Griot. A Griot is modernly recounted as storyteller, musician or historian. But the reality is the tradition, passed from father to son, mother to daughter, requires an artist with exceptional intellect, emotional depth and an epic visionary perspective to accomplish a job which Thomas Hale describes as a “historian, genealogist, advisor, spokesperson, diplomat, mediator, interpreter/translator, musician/ composer, teacher, exhorter, warrior, witness, and praise-singer. The job requires a reading of the past for audiences in the present, an interpretation that reflects a complex blend of both past and present values.” Through the prism of those complex reflections, the Griot uses cultural specificity, illuminating the way forward to universal truth.

Emergency is the magnum opus of arguably the finest modern American Griot in our midst, Daniel Beaty. From the opening moment when a slave ship bursts through the Hudson River in front of the Statue of Liberty, we launch into the boldly funny and unflinching world of Emergency. Daniel explodes on the stage with a herculean emotional agility as he shape shifts through more than 25 characters and creates his own tapestry that introduces the breadth and depth of our humanity. From the indomitable spirit of Clarissa, a spunky 11-year-old fighting AIDS, to the straight-laced Black Republican executive being strangled by his past, each character testifies to the arduous journey towards personal freedom. At the center of the story is a Shakespearean professor trying desperately to repress his past. Aboard the slave ship, Remembrance, the ghost of Chief Kofi channels the spirit of the Griot as he rattles the bones of the ancestors and breaks the chains of oppression through the richness of Beaty’s poetry. Daniel embraces the collective consciousness and history of a people, then urges us forward through his unique blend of music, movement and story to “remember the fullness of who you are.”

Emergency is the calling card of an extraordinary artist baptized in a complex tradition that has survived the millennia. Daniel is the shepherd, the warrior and the witness urging us to “change the way we see—see ourselves, see our past, see our possibility.” As my grandmother would say, “Go on son, tell the story—tell it true.”