This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer one more open dialogue around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on  Monday, March 19 at 7 pm in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

“FRAME-ing Performance” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.

This is not an artistic undertaking for the faint of heart.

From the two-person cast that lay bare all inhibitions — literally as well as theatrically — to usher a fictitious middle school class along a graphic exploration of race, sex and power. To all the cultural deliberation that can surface amid witness of a black prima ballerina performing at the zenith of a historically Eurocentric dance form. Or a medley of classically superior vocalists belting out an operatic take on black life as interpreted nearly a century ago by those well outside that life.

The University Musical Society and University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities skirted no potential disquiet in culling their second slate of creative offerings for later discussion on how such offerings can test the limits of the status quo.

A discussion that, by her own words, left Amanda Krugliak in awe.

“It was a conversation so open and deeply generous in terms of what was being said by everyone on the panel as well as in the audience,” shared the curator of the U-M Institute for the Humanities. Krugliak conceived with Jim Leija, director of education and community engagement for UMS, the three open dialogues being called “FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity.” This most recent exchange continued into February after its January debut.

“Jim and I had talked for several years about wanting to create a gathering in the tradition of early salons in Paris and Berlin, first organized by women who had no space to express their thoughts and ideas,” explained Krugliak.

Their goal, she elaborated, was to create an intimate space not unlike a living room, one “where intelligent people could come and talk about the visual art, music or performance they had seen at UMS or the humanities institute.”

“We weren’t after lip service, or accolades, or a pat on the back for good intentions,” continued Krugliak. “But rather, a frank and informed conversation that would take us all somewhere else further.”

From that foundation ensued a discourse that may not have been quite as well attended as the first FRAME get-together of 30 or so guests. Convened once again in the atrium of the Thayer Building, it proved just as riveting, though. If not more so.

Photo: Underground Railroad Game. Courtesy of the artist.

“I didn’t think I could be made to feel uncomfortable again in my seat,” John Sloan III confessed from the outset of that second back-and-forth of Underground Railroad Game, one of two recent shows from the current UMS season that he attended. An actor and musician originally from Oak Park, Sloan capitalized on his U-M fine arts degree, spending more than a decade trekking around the country affecting others in their respective seats at regional theaters, concerts, and venues along the national tour of Disney’s The Lion King. He finally returned to this area for good this past August, bringing original theatrical works before audiences via his GhostLight Productions Inc.

Yet having appeared in everything from Julius X, a 1960s retelling of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar during the last days of Malcolm X, to Showboat, the racially provocative musical depicting life on a floating theater along the Mississippi River at the turn of the 19^th century, he still found himself grappling with Underground Railroad Game.

Created by and starring Jennifer Kidwell, who is black, and Scott R. Sheppard, who is not, this is the 90-minute farce that made its way to the Arthur Miller Theatre on the campus of Sloan’s alma mater in mid-January. Bringing with it the racially-charged adult language, sexual content, and nudity that inspired The New York Times to declare the off-Broadway show a “resounding testament to theater’s continuing power to shock” when hailing it as one of the best theater productions of 2016.

“The nudity itself wasn’t necessarily provocative for me,” Sloan opined of Kidwell and Sheppard’s portrayal of two fifth grade teachers at Hanover Middle School. This is the school in southeastern Pennsylvania that Sheppard actually attended as a child. And where he actually experienced the premise of his stage collaboration with Kidwell: being led in a role-playing game where Union soldiers try to smuggle slaves — represented by dolls — to freedom. All while Confederate soldiers try to recapture the dolls as they make their way north.

Recast in far more mature terms of late by Sheppard and Kidwell, at times calling upon the audience to become the fifth graders, it was an enactment replete with oral stimulation, domination, masturbation, and the “N” word that Sloan admitted to finding “difficult, in moments, for me to digest emotionally.”

“There was a sense that the nudity allowed for an exploration of status and power dynamics,” he elaborated.  “This became especially dangerous when considering the actors’ identities.  Not to mention the idea that the entire framing was of two teachers using this ‘game’ to instruct middle-school kids.”

Articulating her own discomfort, Billicia Hines, the director of Wayne State University’s black theater program who was also at the UMS presentation of Underground Railroad Game, buttressed that with how the other black women in the audience reacted.

“The black women were really vocal about the fact that they were unhappy with the situation,” according to Hines.

“I understand that the characters in the play were constantly switching roles in terms of power,” she voiced of her dismay, in particular. “However, this play only left me more frustrated. Do I want to see the black female body be objectified even if she chooses to be? No. There are definitely other ways for them to make their point.”

Misty Copeland as Juliet in Kenneth MacMIllan’s Romeo and Juliet. Photo: Gene Schiavone.

What Underground Railroad Game did to shock sensibilities, even provoke the four arts mavens leading the second FRAME discussion to question if they could ever appear in such a project, American Ballet Theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet did to confront notions of cultural identity. And the standard of success in correlation to what has been deemed mainstream.

“Does a European aesthetic have to be the parameter of success?” Hines wondered.

Yes, she maintained, her mother was beside herself merely to get the opportunity to witness Misty Copeland, the first African American to be promoted to a principal dancer within the renowned American Ballet Theatre, onstage. In town from Hines’ home state of North Carolina and all dressed up, she was excited, even perched in the top balcony of the sweeping 2,700-seat Detroit Opera House, to see Copeland perform. For three hours with her daughter among a full house of fellow onlookers who had braved a Michigan snow storm for ABT’s elaboration of Romeo and Juliet.

“She is good in her own right,” Hines granted of Copeland’s leading turn in this enduring romantic tragedy by Shakespeare.

“It wasn’t about Misty,” she disclosed of what ultimately nagged her about the overall experience. “It was about the [dance] company.”

“I kept asking myself, what kind of dynamic would that have presented if she had been dark-skinned and had a big afro?” challenged Willie Sullivan, development coordinator for UMS. “I don’t think that ABT would want that on the stage, quite frankly.”

Still, Sloan cautioned against a discourse on some sort of standard of blackness. More productive, he urged, is the examination of how the black experience has been played out through the lens of white artistic creators. From Ragtime to Once on This Island to, more recently at U-M’s Hill Auditorium thanks to UMS and the university’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Porgy and Bess.

Composed by George Gershwin with his lyricist brother, Ira, and author DuBose Heyward, this long-hallowed love story between a disabled beggar and comely but drug-addicted prostitute that premiered in 1935 debuted more recently at U-M in concert form. That is, with the more familiar theatrical presentation swapped out for an orchestra on stage that, for four hours, fronted the all-black cast of opera singers who were adorned in tuxedos and evening gowns and backed by a sizable multicultural choir.

“Porgy and Bess is a wonderful opera,” insisted Hines. “I love history. However, consistently telling our story from a white person’s point of view is getting tiresome. Do they truly know how we are feeling? I say no. And constant images of weary black people sticks in our souls and unconsciously stains

Photo: Porgy and Bess. Courtesy of Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts.

our hopes and dreams.”

Such candor is why Sharman Spieser was glad she didn’t go with her first inclination to skip this latest FRAME salon, an informal occasion again that, according to her, “created a sense of intimacy and spontaneity.”

“Listening made me feel part of the sharing, and this deepened my understanding and appreciation for the complexity, authenticity, and skill that artists offer our world,” raved the independent education consultant. With a ticket already to Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation, the multi-media concert that UMS will host on March 14, Spieser plans to be at the final FRAME discussion five days later as well.

“They bare their souls for us,” she noted of the creative professionals who lend their time and insight to facilitate these talks after such performances. “I have so much respect for them!”

This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer one more open dialogue around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on  Monday, March 19 at 7 PM in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

“FRAME-ing Performance” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.

This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer  two more open dialogues around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on Monday, February 19 and Monday, March 19 at 7 PM in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

“Disrupting the FRAME” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.

Getting a glimpse into the heavily-shrouded quandary that we African-American women have had with our hair throughout time. And coming face to face, of a sort, with 73 civilians – 72 men and one woman – who were killed over four days in the 2010 drug war in Kingston, Jamaica, known as the “Tivoli Incursion.”

Such was the impetus of the first of a three-part series of public discussions being held at the University of Michigan that examine how contemporary art, be it exhibited or performed, can challenge the very framework of social conventions.

“These kind of disruptions can be groundbreaking,” summed up Detroit native Taylor Renee Aldridge. “We need to have these dialogues.”

Of burgeoning prominence as an art critic, curator and co-founder of the ARTS.BLACK online journal, Aldrige was speaking before a diverse gathering of some 30 attendees who filled the atrium of the 202 South Thayer Building last Monday evening. There, in this site of the U-M Institute for the Humanities, educator and contemporary dancer and choreographer Jennifer Harge joined her in helming the exchange. As did Jillian Walker, a U-M alumna like Harge, who’s taking time out from an award-winning career in New York writing plays to draft her latest script back here in her home region as a resident artist with the University Musical Society. Michael Awkward, the Gayl A. Jones Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture at U-M, was also on hand as a key speaker.

Aldrige, Harge, Walker and Awkward were brought together by the university and UMS, the independent performing arts group housed among the downtown Ann Arbor hub of this sprawling, venerated center for higher learning. Their casual but decisive conversation kicked off “FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity” that’s slated to reconvene on February 19 and March 19.

“Amanda Krugliak, who is the curator at the U-M Institute for the Humanities, and I had noticed that many of our artistic projects were in dialogue with each other,” explained Jim Leija, the director of education and community engagement for UMS.

“For some time now, we’ve wanted to build that implied dialogue into something more explicit and intentional,” he elaborated. “The notion of an informal salon surfaced as a counterpoint to the many academic platforms that already exist in our most immediate university community in Ann Arbor. This year in particular, our institutions are both presenting shows that are dealing quite explicitly with questions of identity, and even more specifically with race.”

The all-black cast of creative professionals who launched the FRAME series speaking with assorted guests on Jan. 22 about the show from the current UMS season and exhibit they attended together embody what Leija began seeking out for these dialogues this

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

past summer – diversity. And their commentary ranged from the discomfort that Taylor and Harge articulated about some of the expressly cultural lingo included in “Hair & Other Stories,” the interpretive performance brought to Ann Arbor by the Urban Bush Women on Jan. 12. To the sense of empowerment Walker, in contrast, shared that she gleaned from her account of the rare showcase of African American vitality presented by this Brooklyn-based company dedicated to melding artistic expression with community engagement to promote social justice.

“I took this as an opportunity to be seen with other black women,” Walker said of an evening of music, movement and declaration that literally brought her to her feet. Brought her to her feet among a multiracial crowd that packed the more than 1,200-seat theater in the U-M’s towering, mirror-encased Power Center for the Performing Arts.

The Ann Arbor performance kicked off a 14-city tour through April for the Urban Bush Women. And the company was true to its internationally recognized penchant for weaving contemporary dance, music and text – accentuated by strobe lights and haze at the Power Center – to defy boundaries in sharing the gamut of the African-American experience with people of all backgrounds. An ambition that wasn’t lost on any of the speakers at the ensuing first FRAME discussion. But one that certainly wasn’t universally received, either.

“I was really taken by the physicality of the performance, so much so that I could have done without the didactics,” admitted Aldridge. She, like Harge, took exception to the liberal mention of “naps” and “kitchens” – hair vernacular long rooted strictly among black folks – during the event.

“I felt like I was having a family discussion in mixed company,” Harge added. “I felt exposed.”

And Harge, a lecturer at both U-M and Oakland University, is no stranger to mining the African American experience – from protest movements to hip hop – to help strengthen community engagement and promote social change. Trained in modern dance, with a

Jennifer Harge teaching with Harge Dance Stories. Photo by Carlos Funn.

master’s degree from the University of Iowa as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow, and a bachelor’s from U-M, she has run a Detroit-based performance collective called Harge Dance Stories for the past four years.

Yet it was the ambivalence of Harge and others to what the Urban Bush Women conveyed onstage in this area most recently that had Awkward zero in on the disparity that can result from exposing some of the darkest secrets of black hair. Beyond the black community.

“Part of the performance was like letting out a nappy secret about the preparation that needs to go into black hair in order to be seen as what’s considered presentable,” he surmised at last week’s FRAME discussion. “Then they turned the lights up in the audience [at one point], so we were as visible as they were on stage.”

An apparent moment of vulnerability that never surfaced the next afternoon, in Detroit, at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. That’s where Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who founded the Urban Bush Women in 1984, took some of her dancers from the Ann Arbor performance to host a community workshop delving into the historical connection between hair, social consciousness and dance among African Americans. The rest of her troupe that had traveled here to Metro Detroit with her from their Brooklyn creative base conducted the workshop at the Ann Arbor YMCA that same day.

With the gallery space at the Wright Museum where this event took place cleared of any seating, the dozens of people who showed up, many with children in tow, found themselves on foot the entire time. And doing their best to keep up as Zollar and company led them in doing the Stroll, the Twist, the Jerk and other vintage moves.

She didn’t avoid any of the hair terminology that her dancers had bandied onstage in Ann Arbor, either. Yet contrary to any of the varied audience reaction from the previous day, the spirited, diminutive 67-year-old managed to provoke quite a few wistful smiles among her exclusively African American audience.

When all was said and done, the occasion turned out to be quite family-centric, made all the more so with Aminata, the not quite 2-year-old daughter of Urban Bush Women dancer and associate artistic director, Samantha Speis. Having performed with Speis and her colleagues in Ann Arbor, Aminata was with them at The Wright as well to participate with the Urban Bush Women.

Photo: Urban Bush Women. Courtesy of artist.

Alongside local mother and wife Sherita Gosha-Williams during this occasion were her daughters, 13-year-old Jaylah and 9-year-old Siana.

“It was important to me to bring my daughters, very important,” Gosha-Williams, whose husband and 4-year-old son were back home in Lenox Township, said while flanked at The Wright by her other two children. “Being that our culture is not often promoted positively in the media, I wanted them to know the foundation and beauty of our hair.”

Her mission speaks volumes about the possibilities of a better future for children of color. Far better, hopefully, than the one that was snatched from the black men, and one woman at the hands of their own people during the Tivoli Incursion.  Tucked away in a small gallery at the front of the Institute for the Humanities atrium where last week’s FRAME session transpired, the mixed-media vision of Kingston-born artist, Ebony G. Patterson, brings this still-haunting massacre into glaring view until Feb. 9.

Known as “The Of 72 Project,” Patterson employed fabric, digital pictures, embroidery, rhinestones, trimmings, bandanas and floral appliques once again to offer commentary on the United States’ bid to extradite a Jamaican drug lord named Christopher “Dudus” Coke. It was a demand that plunged Kingston under a state of emergency in May 2010 as Jamaica’s military and police forces battled Coke’s Shower Posse cartel, leaving dozens of individuals dead whose identities remain a mystery to this day.

And, according to Awkward, author of six books probing race and gender representations in 20th and 21st century black American expressive culture, a calamity that parallels what it can mean to be black and meet a violent, untimely end in the U.S. Namely, in the frustration over crucial truths concerning the lives and deaths of these people that remain elusive, elaborated Awkward, who’s now writing a book on Emmett Till and other black American boys famously murdered or psychologically mangled since him.

“It’s the same story, the fear of the other, and the desire to obtain power over the other,” asserted George Shirley, 83-year-old emeritus professor of the U-M School of Music who attended last week’s  FRAME discussion.

More like a narrative in overcoming that fear to break down barriers among people that’s given more lip service than anything else, to hear 19-year-old Lanae Jefferson tell it. Even at a long-regarded progressive institution like U-M, where she’s a sophomore.

“I don’t like how the university likes to say we’re so diverse, and I don’t see the diversity,” Jefferson, also there at the FRAME dialogue, charged. “Personally, I don’t feel comfortable on this campus. It’s very large and has many cliques”

Which raises the question of how to get more students “who really need to be there out to the many UMS performances about diversity and inclusion [on campus],” according to the Southfield native who’s interested in art history.

Her sentiment magnifies the challenge facing UMS and the U-M Institute for the Humanities, with two open FRAME discussions that Aldridge and Harge will host remaining, in moving forward in their mission. That is, Leija reiterated, “to bring a diverse group of people together to explore how visual art and performance can be used as a tool for disrupting the status quo and building a different culture and reality for all of us.”

And while talk alone isn’t tantamount to bringing about actual change, Aldridge pointed out, “Having cross-cultural dialogues about marginalization and our respective differences and attributes is necessary to upending the status quo of patriarchal white supremacy and white-centered gazes in art-making. It has the potential to foster change, and to consider how we perpetuate these gazes.”

This essay is published in conjunction with FRAME: A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity surrounding the No Safety Net Series theater festival performances. The U-M Institute for the Humanities and UMS will offer  two more open dialogues around contemporary visual art, performance, and identity on Monday, February 19 and Monday, March 19 at 7 PM in the Atrium at 202 South Thayer Building in Ann Arbor.

 “Disrupting the FRAME” is written by Angela G. King. King is a writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her most recent endeavors include “The Girl Who Wasn’t There,” a memoir of human trafficking that she’s helping one young West African woman to share.