SUPPORT POST: Death of the Diva

What is a diva?

Answer (from Wikipedia):

A diva (English pronunciation: /ˈdiːvə/, Italian: [ˈdiːva]) is a celebrated female singer. The term is used to describe a woman of outstanding talent in the world of opera, and, by extension, in theatre, cinema and popular music.

Okay.  So we know who those are - the far and few between who happen to be celebrated.  But we also know the new divas...the Kardashians, the Hiltons, or others who I can't name because frankly I just don't pay close enough attention.  

I'm not an avid TV viewer, I go for days, sometimes weeks without touching the clicker.  This wasn't always the case.  There was a time, back when television and cable programming had more 'original', and gasp (!), creative content, and less mind-numbing carnivals* showcasing the most base of human behavior under the heading 'reality'.

At the heart of this soul crushing content is not the celebration of women but the degradation of them.  And though many of us protested this shift that has now become the norm; the reality IS, that this demeaning content 1) entertains the masses, 2) catapults many a vapid being to undeserving supernova stardom from such spectacle, and 3) creates associations for all womanhood that serve more to undo the triumphs for equality and respect so hard won.  The new diva represents nothing of any progressive use, and so hurts those of us who have something inspiring, magnificent, or unique to offer. As performer/actor/DJ Amanda Seale (formerly known as Amanda Diva) aptly notes "we're put in this corner where I may have to be less than the woman my mother raised me to be".

This concern is at the heart of her new one-woman show now up in New York, Death of a Diva, directed by Roger C. Jeffrey.  Roger is a dear friend, past dance teacher of mine, and an accomplished dancer and choreographer.  He has deep social concerns for women, youth, racial inequities, and matters of the soul - he's a gapminder, who works always with superior talent.  So no surprise to me that he's a part of a most meaningful project written and performed by this accomplished female talent.  Seale's conscientiously written work tackles the attack on the image of women in all media and  appears to be every bit as heightened, intelligent, and damn funny in her performance.

Seale takes the stage this month offering ideas, and stories of the woman and the diva, through voices of multiple characters in this performance, each of whom will provoke thought and reopen active dialogue on what appears now to be a frighteningly passive issue.  This is too good, and too important to miss. I mean really, have we killed the diva?!

Amanda Seale's Death of a Diva plays:

March 23rd - April 1st 

at The Helen Mills Theater, NYC

135 West 26th Street (btw 6th & 7th Aves) 

Get Tickets HERE!!

Why do women look so silly on Reality TV?

Support Video:

March 5th, UPDATE:  

ADD'L Performance dates and Venues:

Sat 3/3: Death of the Diva at NCCU Durham, NC 7p

Tues 3/13: Death of the Diva FREE live sneak peak! 8-10p @ Bleu Violin (116/5th ave) spec perf by: Kimberly Nichole

Thurs 3/15: Death of the Diva FREE live sneak peak! 8-10p @ Free Candy

Fri 3/16: The Schomburg Museum presents: Theater Talks w/ Amanda Seales hosted by Elon James (Time TBD)

Mon 3/20: NYU for Women's History Month Events presents: Death of the Diva

*(for further reading that supports this gripe - please see my favourite article ever written on the matter: I'm A Culture Critic...Get Me Out of Here! by James Wolcott, Dec 2009)

LABYRINTH of FOREVER: Doorway for the Spirit Chasers

So I'm doing it again. I've entered the annual Art For Progress competition: Clash of the Artists 2010 and I need YOUR VOTE!  

It's a small annual global contest with a handful of competitive categories: Visual Art, Music, Film, Fashion, DJ, and Creative.  I've put a video in the Creative category.   Some of you may remember I won this back in 2008 with a video presentation of my photo series SPLIT.  

This video is a new edit of work I directed (shot by Fury Young) last Spring.  I prepared a treatment and scripted scenes for this a couple years ago, originally to be part of my CrowDeD series.

I then adapted it for a projection piece used in a 30 minute dance performance at Nina Buisson's Avant Garde Festival in June 09'. 

It's a much shorter edit now, at 7 mins, with the new title, LABYRINTH of FOREVER: Doorway for the Spirit Chasers. Mystic Urchin supplemented it with some great text too! I hope you like it. 

Please click the links to vote - when you get there, scroll down on the Art for Progress Creative voting page to find my video.  Thanks y'all!


NOTE: You will be sent a confirmation email with link that you need to click on or your vote won't go through. 


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VOTE FOR THIS VIDEO


LABYRINTH of FOREVER: Doorway for the Spirit Chasers from SeBiArt on Vimeo.

|excerpt|

the promise of forever frightens us,
threatening to bury us
in an immeasurable matrix
of darkness…

hold to your frequency
to live forever


~Mystic Urchin~

CREDITS:

Art and Film Direction by Berette Macaulay

Performers in Order of Appearance:
Maki Shinagawa
Cristal Albornoz
Berette Macaulay

Shot by Fury Young

Text by Steve ‘Urchin’ Wilson

Painting and Costumes by Cristal Albornoz

Additional photography SeBiArt

Film, Sound, and Text Editing by Berette Macaulay

A SeBiArt Production.

*Add'l Behind the Hidden Gate colour foto inserts I promised in a recent post.

RELATED JOURNEY POSTS: 

I Friggin WON!!! Ha - I got support like Obama!! lol! (Feb 2008)

Avant Garde Festival (May 2009)

Behind The Hidden Gate (Jan 2010)

Behind the Hidden Gate

Because I never did show you.

This is the first set of a no-frills view of images I have lying around. My friends and fellow collaborators Nina Buisson and Devin Pullins got together to do this shoot with me last summer - intended to be a part of Nina's Avant Garde Festival show at JUDSON Memorial in New York. A handful were used in an onstage projection as part of the show, but most of these never saw the light of day, until now. 

NB: You will need to update Flash Player to view this.  If viewing from Facebook - please click 'Original Post' to see slideshow.
 

I'll post the other set of colour images when I get a few finals sorted. For those of you following my work - you'll notice that the light, abstract period I'm currently in, directly followed this work. The images were created using a similar lighting style as CrowDeD and other dark and isolating portraiture methods that I  employed up until Summer 2009. Things started to get more colourful as my travels began last year in Germany.  (Yes, I've yet to post my video diary - but I will, one day.  haha! )

Concept and Design:

Berette Macaulay and Nina Buisson with commissioned painting by Cristal Albornoz

Title by Nina

All Photography by Berette Macaulay

Location:

Millenium Studios (arranged by Artistic Dir. Devin Pullins)

Make Up: By Margherita Tisato and Cristal Albornoz

(Devin's Make up Designed by Berette)

Costume: Cristal Albornoz & Maddy Kebedjs

RELATED JOURNEY POST:  Avant Garde Festival (May 2009) 

Support Post: Epic Theater Ensemble Just Won BIG TIME!

I'm so proud to show support for a deserving group. My acting teacher from college, Godfrey Simmons Jr, serves as one of the artistic producers at Epic Theater Ensemble here in New York, and one of their after school theater programs "Shakespeare Remix" has just received a most prestigious reward:

WE HAVE WON

...the 2009 COMING UP TALLER AWARD presented by the PRESIDENT'S COMMITTEE on the

ARTS and the HUMANITIES for our SHAKESPEARE REMIX program. This prestigious award 

recognizes and supports outstanding after-school arts and humanities programs for 

children, especially those with great potential, but limited outlets for creative 

expression.

Here is a breakdown on what they are about, with board director and kick ass actor David Strathairn:

Check out their website for more info plus showtimes for Shakespeare Remix and other projects: Epic Theater Ensemble 

(www.epictheatrectr.org)

Avant Garde Festival

So I've been a bit quiet about doing stuff I know - so here's a mini news brief.

I'm now in preparation for a show with Nina Buisson of NBCM Dance co. I used to dance with her and collaborated on a few shows back in the day. It 's amazing how easy it is to create with this special talent, as our tastes are similar. And I owe much gratitude to the universe that we still continue to inspire each other's creative growth because it's so rare and satisfying as an artist to experience ease in collaboration. She loved the work I was doing with my photo series CrowDeD (which features a few dancers from the company), and I LOVE her choreography, so it was a long but natural progression I guess that it would all come together in a show.

She has created what we hope will become an ongoing event entitled the Avant Garde Festival which will debut at JUDSON MEMORIAL in Washington Square Park this coming June 12 & 13th. It is an incredible space (see flyer below for more show details and RSVP to your right on the GOING.com flyer AND buy tickets HERE!)

The Festival gives dancers, artists, and choreographers the opportunity to present their latest work professionally. In this space we will create a fantasy world full of surprises. There will be works by other groups also, but for us, we will at last realize what has been a brewing idea for four years - to finally stage an interdisciplinary collaborative work featuring dance, photography, theater arts, and film entitled Behind the Hidden Gate. I hope many of you will come to see Nina's incredible choreography, and my most honest photographic work to date blown up to gigantic proportions of 20x30 feet!!







Secondly, I will have prints on view in a one night show with Antagonist Art in the East Village in June also. Will post details for that soon!

See the full series CrowDeD HERE!!

One Love

My Bliss is Dance...what's yours?

Few things make me as happy as dance; it is after all, the love of my life, and has been since I discovered self expression and freedom of the soul through movement at the age of 6.

Since then I have had quite the tumultuous mental, emotional, and physical affair with it - much of this affair has been in the dark, in private corners, in secret spaces. Though I explored movement on stage in high school and during my acting years - it was funnily enough when I was an adult that I finally took on formal training in the art that makes my soul sing.

Living in New York avails one the constant access to the best dance companies in the world, as a student, and as a theater-goer. I have enjoyed this fact for the 10+ years that I have lived here, and have often felt blessed to have enjoyed watching some VERY good performances, and even more incomprehensibly lucky for having broken bread with, learned from, and worked for or alongside some incredible talent on wonderful stages in this city.

But with that said - there are few nights like tonight, for tonight I had a smile pasted across my face for two hours straight as I watched at the JOYCE Theater - the Nederlands Dans Theatre (NDT II). This was a limited engagement (they have not been to the United States in 10 years!!) with 2 extended performances - that all sold out FAST! Scores of heartbroken people were turned away from the theater box office. The staff at the JOYCE (with whom I've become quite familiar from my frequent visits to attend shows) were giddy from the excitement rarely seen in the theater. We were after all, gathering in sweet anticipation of one of the most innovative ballet companies on the planet - to see a group of dancers with incredibly diverse facility of movement, boasting as their resident choreographers one of the most celebrated and revered in the world - Jirí Kylián (who - as rumor has it, will be retiring next year) and the beloved Lightfoot/León!! Well - they DID NOT DISAPPOINT. I quite literally squealed in delight when I read the program - I could not have asked God or Fortune for more!!! All my favorite (straight dance) pieces from these choreographers that I've seen video of countless times I just saw LIVE!! OMG!!! Yes - I just said "OMG"!!! I leave you with YOUTUBE snippets of each of the pieces I saw tonight - and not another word...












In order of appearance:

Said and Done (2001) - Lightfoot León

Sleepless (2004) - Jirí Kylián

Shutters Shut (2003) - Lightfoot León
(poem written & read by Gertrude Stein about her friend Pablo Picasso)

Sad Case (1998) - Lightfoot León
(full piece shown in two parts)



For this video - Said and Done is the third clip in...

A Response to DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA

I received a most moving email describing the new endeavors of my acting professor Godfrey Simmons Jr, inspired by Barack Obama's Historic victory. (See my Favourite Blog List or go directly to www.dispatchesfromamendedamerica.blogspot.com). I was immediately inspired by his appeal and responded to it with a most personal account of my journey as a black immigrant here in the United States. First a synopsis of his project - followed by my response:

In the month leading up to the Presidential Inauguration, I will be traveling throughout America with my friend and colleague Brandt Adams to interview Americans about this watershed event. The guiding questions will be: What does the election of America's first African American President mean to you? Has this changed your life and if so, how? Has this changed America? What do we do now? We feel we can best investigate these questions by soliciting real Americans' own stories of the 2008 presidential election through their eyes and in their own words. What are their hopes for the President elected on hope? What suggestions can they give to an Obama administration that would keep them engaged in the governance of our country?

The interviews, which will be digitally recorded either on audio or video, will form the basis of a documentary theatre piece called DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA. Brandt and I, two displaced sons of the South, will begin traveling on December 28th along the same routes used by The Freedom Riders in 1960 and then make our way from Mississippi, North toward Chicago, retracing The Great Migration of African Americans from 1910-1940. Finally, we'll make our way eastward through Philadelphia, finally landing in Washington DC on January 19th in time for the Presidential Inaugural Ceremony. We plan to interview people in Farmville, Virginia, home to one of the school districts included in the original five cases comprising Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; Greensboro, site of the first civil rights sit-in at Woolworth's; and Oxford, Mississippi, where James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. The fact that Brandt is a 25-year-old white man born and raised in Virginia and I am a 42-year-old black man raised in Virginia only serves to amplify the resonance of this project to us both personally and politically.

My Response

I would like to share a couple of thoughts with you on this if you don't mind. I know I'm not an American, and so there's a particular meaning that this election has had for African Americans that I can't share in a historical or cultural context, but I can certainly share in an emotional one, as a black immigrant in this country. As you know, I am the daughter of two attorneys/human rights activists - of West African and German decent. I grew up as a foreigner in every country I've lived, in Jamaica, the UK, and now here, raised with ideals that espouse the same values as those lofty ones upon which this country was built...We The People... .  I moved here with, as I was told, a blanket over my eyes. I therefore lived to, and relished in cracking the glass of stereotypes. I was lucky to make it to my mid-twenties with no idea, experience, or frankly belief in racism; with no tolerance for the so-called existence of it in my daily life; no real empathy for any one who cried from its contemporary lashes; and I certainly didn't identify with the living meaning of 'minority' - for you see, I had that middle class up-bringing in nations where either BLACK was the majority (and so therefore I've seen black leaders of nations), or in the UK where being 'an educated black' was lauded so much so that it was barely even noticed! A far cry from America where being black was a point to be noted no matter WHAT you do or where you are from! You're black first, and then the rest of your demographic or personal details can be organized into some pre-ordained section of the social quilt.

Over the years, I have felt the blanket I came here with fall from my eyes. I can no longer argue, shut off, or close my eyes to the fact that I have been fighting a thing I never fought before. I have to fight to be me, to be 'Berette'. I know undeniably now how "the angry black woman" is formed. Not so much because of I've become one, but because of moments when I channeled the feeling of one because I felt denied the right to be the educated, beautiful, mild mannered, sexy, intelligent and sophisticated being that I actually am. Yes I said it! ha! When I open my mouth and this nondescript accent comes out, I am no longer blinded to the confusion it causes - I am now hurt by it. When I speak in well constructed sentences, and offer bridge-tales for a desperate connection - or as an explanation, I have felt saddened by the fascination and incredulousness in the eyes of some of my listeners or audience, and no longer enjoy the acceptance I gain, as it is often in the form of exotification if you will. If I don't dress in fashionable duds, I can't get a cab or service in a store. I can't deny that the woman I am, that many of my sisters are, is not seen in the media or represented in a way to reinforce the validation of my apparent freakish existence. I can't believe that I find myself now seeing, feeling, and experiencing things I never saw, felt, or heard in my childhood. As a woman, a black woman, I have come to experience and understand the burden of this ascribed status and its place at the bottom of the totem pole. I have come to understand as a quiet social rule that I am not a status prize on the arm of men, and most painfully therefore of black men who have further to climb. I have taken on damaging thoughts of myself. After over a decade, I have fallen from my parents' idealistic heights and now live as a 'minority'.

I was going through an emotional break - a sense of a loss of self, and I needed to get out, for in my subjective world, - I came to conclude that while living here, America was apparently teaching me to hate myself. Then Barack Obama came along, with that wife of his. :) Let me state that since March of this year, it was Michelle Obama who held my interest most. It was her, who gave him deep character in my eyes. It was her interviews and speeches I paid closest attention to - most of them featured on CSPAN. He was easy for me to accept - as we have seen this (type of) man represented in politics and media before - and frankly I grew up around men like that, his rhetoric, his sentiments, wishes, projections, dreams were refreshingly familiar to me. His style of debate woke up an unused part of my mind and heart and brought my father back to me.  But his wife - she represents CHANGE, in a way that will I believe, quietly shift and alter far more in the current paradigm of the world than even his win.   I grew up with women like this all around me too - my mother being one cut from the same cloth.  But rarely have I seen these women commonly featured plainly in politics, high academia, or media, if at all, the lack of which contributed to my forgetfulness and diminutive perception of myself in America.  Oh, to be so priviliged to be a little black girl in the world today to see her, a tall dark-skinned, broad-nosed, well spoken educated, black woman as the First Lady of a first world white majority nation!  As she said, and I paraphrase 'to be a girl who will be a woman my age some day living in a world where she can take this for granted!'  INDEED.  What privilige to be black adult female to see that too. WE needed that. I NEEDED, I NEEDED to see THAT in my lifetime. How will this change how black women are seen? How will this lift some of the burden? How will this remove: the xenophobia, the concubine crown, the mammi cap, the animalistic vulgarness expected of us, the anger, the pain, bipolar post-traumatic stress and confusion, the lashes of thankless expectation of strength, the lack of positive reinforcement, the lack of permission to be weak or to be great? How will this remove the invisibility? Will this give black women the right to be unremarkably yet respectfully normal? Godfrey, this is what I wept for that night.

Strangely enough - I really didn't experience doubt about the trajectory of Barack's campaign. It seemed ordained and so I believed, but not with a blanket over my eyes, rather with a knowing and a worry frankly, of how he would be regarded by the end of 2009. For anyone who would have won, love and popularity would not be theirs' to hold by the holidays of next year, but I felt weary of the first black president having to endure the impatience from the public from what will be hardcore third world political choices imposed on us to fix the mess of that nitwit Bush. It will be interesting to see how long and how tightly we can hold on to the hopes we now project onto our Son of Hope. He will need our faith and our patience and our belief and our celebration more a year from now - it is key that we know this now - for the romance will end shortly.

My mum called me from Jamaica - and we wept - and she said - "You see Berette, you see what he what he has done? Look at his supporters: an even mix of every type person jumping together as one force - that is the world we raised you to see, that is the world we wanted to you to live in." And I cried out, LOUDLY and vigourously, because that night, I remembered the girl I was when I moved here and my heart opened to begin loving myself in the American context  again.

I wish you every possible blessing on this journey. I wish for you to be filled and for you to find all you seek, I anxiously await the blog entries and the theatrical work that will be birthed from this effort.

Peace with much ease dear brother, teacher, and old friend,

Berette