Evidence of Love (excerpt) by Daniel Alexander Jones

EVIDENCE OF LOVE (re)memory as revolution -or- staging sovereignty in Texas.

By Daniel Alexander Jones

What does it mean to see and be seen through the eyes of love?

To bloom on your own terms?

Summer 1995. We make revolutionary love in Texas. Wildflower true. In the blazing heat of this place between. Over two consecutive moons. Sovereign Black Queer stories sound from the center. Sharon Bridgforth writes and produces her show no mo blues with her theatre company root wy’mn. I direct an evening that includes Shay Youngblood’s Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream and my own Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings. All of us in the dusty cool air-conditioned air of Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre. In the repurposed old Post Office building on the corner of 43rd and Guadalupe.

Hyde Park. Austin, TX. Artistic Director Vicky Boone invites us to play. Our play is practice.

Our practice is evidence of love.

“Who are you talking to? Are you talking to me? I know I’m beautiful. You’re talking to white people who are saying you’re not and therefore you should be segregated or oppressed. I’m not talking to white people. I’m talking–in my books–I’m reading them, so I’m talking to me, which means I’m talking to Black people.”

-Toni Morrison on the phrase “Black is beautiful”.

“My very best readings, yes. But not always. I would have to say because it comes into ‘who do I write for?’, I write for and to any human being who can be touched, reached by my work.”

-Audre Lorde in response to the question “are there mostly women in the audiences [for her poetry readings].

“It was always my interest to create a wildly open space and to live a wildly open life. That may come from the time and the place that I came into being in Houston, TX in the ‘60s, coming up inside of that and just feeling this incredible desire to open everything up and to connect across codes. It was real central to my development as a young person to not want to stay inside–as we see now [especially]–these fucking powerful structures! It was definitely about tearing down edges and creating an openness for people to flow in, and to speak for themselves. If you just invite people in and give them space to really speak for themselves – how incredibly revolutionary that is for everyone. To get the straight, unfiltered experience of people in all of their humor and their love and their fierceness and what they have to say and what they’re pissed about, what makes them laugh… I like people unfiltered.”

-Vicky Boone on the ethos of Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre.

frontera (n): 1. Border. 2. Frontier.

Black (adj): ∞

Queer (adj): ∞

©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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Nowadays? Sharon and I talk all the time. Bounce sunlight back and forth like you need to do.

Sometimes (most times) fuss about the world. We porch sit.

Neither of us have a porch. Sit nonetheless. Virtually these days.

We joke about having people gather around to hear us pontificate. “We gots thangs to say!” When one of us gets going, the other’s been known to shout “go on, Ponti!” Sharon is my soul sibling. Been so. Be so. Will be so.

Over time and space.

Sister/brother style. Lately, we talk about what the young and the old know and don’t know, how we must imagine and remember together. And with a leg-slap mmm-mmm-mmm we find ourselves talking about forgetting. How forgetting ain’t benign or a mistake. How we long ago took up the charge of remembering through our art as our sacred work. “Every act of imagination is simultaneously an act of remembrance and vice-versa”, I’ve been known to shout on occasion. This is one such occasion. The archive is alive. By adding this testimony to it, my hope is to animate new connections across it; and, to offer our evidence to contemporary makers. “25 years!”

Sharon sounds out each syllable for emphasis. “It’s been 25 years, Man!”1

We saw our Mamas do. And those regal Queens and stone Butches. Everybody taking their space so boldly you couldn’t imagine there had ever been anything other than free.

Ntozake Shange probably scratched half the sacred code of our artistic DNA while musing in the margins with her pencil one morning. And the rest was a gumbo. Our eyes and fingers had combed the holy words of Audre Lorde. And Pat Parker. And Toni Morrison. And Essex Hemphill. We’d watched Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley spin worlds into being with the ease of cooking everyday feasts from whatever happened to be in the cupboard. So anyone who came around talking to any of us about categories and limits started to sound mush-mouthed and lost our interest with the quickness.

Shay Youngblood, Sharon Bridgforth and I knew who we were because we knew whose Photo: Daniel Alexander Jones (le ) and Sharon Bridgforth (right), opening night of Revolutionary Love at Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, Austin, 1995. Author’s archive.

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we were. Shay and Sharon had started corresponding in the late 1980s. I met Shay in 1991 and Sharon in 1994. We were all out, Queer, Black, art&spirit folks and those very identifiers were at once beloved tangled gardens and open gate questions; we vibrated beyond their visible spectra. Around this time we all connected with Vicky Boone, a visionary young white director and producer who, along with a group of Austin-based artists, was embarking on an exploration of theatre rooted in hospitality. We recognized one another at first sight as fellow beings becoming. And we were all about our work.

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–frontera–

The RAT Conference started in the early 1990s. Erik Ehn, who is pretty much St. Francis of Assisi’s secret identity this go-round, was an architect of RAT, convening folks across the country with his word-made-flesh skillset. Central to his worldview was the concept of radical hospitality, which became the modus operandi for a far-flung national network of artists, companies and small theatres. Seattle, New York City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Austin were hubs. Vicky Boone, a native Texan returned to the Lone Star State with her college classmates Annie Suite and Jason Phelps to found Frontera Productions in 1992. As they began their work those three and their new associates, who were mostly white folks, launched FronteraFest, a performance festival that featured a wide range of local and regional artists. As the festival grew, RAT-affiliated artists from around the country were invited. By doing so Frontera signaled that it was going to invite conversation and collaboration with a wide range of people and aesthetics, all while

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Photo: Shay Youngblood, Providence, RI, 1992. Author’s archive. ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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being firm-footed as a place centering local audiences and artists, many of whom had not been embraced by Austin’s other theatres.

“As Frontera grew, if there was one thing we all agreed on it was radical action, radical creation, radical performance, radical thought and execution. Everyone was in such support of that basic concept.” -Vicky Boone3

Austin in the early 90s was part sleepy Texan town with deep-seated Black and Brown communities living alongside a white Southern majority including educated liberals, a notable aging Hippie population and right-wing conservative Christians.

Racism was baked in its bones and the scars of segregation ran deep. I-35 a concrete death-trap body modifier sliced historically Black East Austin from the largely white West. Town Lake (now Lady Bird Lake) marked the divide between downtown and the historically Brown South Austin. Still, something about Austin was permeable, even permissive, shaped in part by it being a University town, and by virtue of the fact of its reputation as a relatively le -leaning oasis in a Republican state. Democrat Ann Richards was governor (followed by George W. Bush).

In those 1990s summers, with blazing sun so ening the asphalt and kicking temperatures up above 100° it felt like folk couldn’t be bothered getting that riled up most days. It also felt like anything could happen.

Different concepts of freedom were being asserted concurrently. Overlapping in places.

Colliding in others. Performance artist Linda Montano and dance legend Deborah Hay had moved to Austin. Hay in the late ‘80s to forge a new creative chapter. Montano in the early ‘90s to teach at UT. Both artists’ feminism and contemplative practices radiate out to the burgeoning community of late-Boomer and Gen-X artists drawn to Austin from around the country (and internationally). Erik Ehn’s humility, a shocking rarity for a white man of his generation (borne perhaps from his Dorothy Day Catholicism meets Punk meets Indie Theatre makeup) resonated with that vibration. In addition to Austin’s peerless music scene, there were strong arts traditions among communities of 3

Photo: Vicky Boone, Austin, 1996. Author’s archive. ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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color. Boyd Vance and Cynthia Taylor-Edwards were both fixtures of Austin’s Black theatre. La Peña was a gallery run by sisters Cynthia and Lydia Perez who centered Latino/a art and culture and who also owned the popular restaurant Las Manitas down the block. Xicana/Indigena artists held space. Queer folk were vital arteries in the city and surrounding towns. Polymath Ana Sisnett with her glorious mane of dreadlocks was a fixture at allgo, Austin’s Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (which later became a statewide QTPOC org); she worked toward computer literacy and access for poor and working-class folks. Prominent Austin lesbian and/or feminist organizations include Women and their Work, Alma de Mujer, and BookWoman.

Frontera stood at the crossroads of its own name: one part borderland, one part frontier.

–Black. Queer. Sovereign.–

Black Queer performance has been central to American popular culture (Black and white) even as it hid in plain sight. Those artists in music or literature who dared to be out paid steep prices or were sidelined; in some cases they ended up distancing themselves from ‘the life” or tried to go back in the closet by getting “saved”. Theatre, kind of like in-jokes about church choirs, could not happen without Queer folk. But centering Black Queer subjects onstage was a rare thing, and even rarer if you are talking about Black Queer subjects who were sovereign–i.e. not a product of reductive white imagination (as magical friends or caretakers, for example) nor created by Black writers with white audience consumption in mind (as in snap-queens on steroids or the like). Within Black popular theatre spaces, Queer characters were most o en objects of ridicule or sensational revelation. Sovereign Black Queerness flourished historically in spaces outside the mainstream, from Harlem Renaissance rent-parties, through innumerable parties and clubs and ballrooms, to burgeoning performance art spaces. It was o en borne of the twin flames of activism and poetic healing.

Just a few years prior, the performance troupe Pomo Afro Homo (Djola B. Branner, Brian Freeman, and the late Eric Gupton) had been banned from the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina, even as their vital piece Fierce Love garnered national praise from critics and audiences alike. Some of the other attending festival artists staged a walk-out as protest. Shay and I got to see Fierce Love at Rites and Reason Theatre in the fall of ‘91, during our first semester of graduate school at Brown. These three splendid men, all angles and velvet and fire and glorious self-regard could voice the secrets, throw the shade, raise the roof then come back to a shockingly vulnerable pause. We couldn’t take our eyes off of them because they had rendered themselves crystal clear. That year it felt like the skies were opening for Black Gay Men’s visibility ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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with Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied broadcast on PBS and with Brother to Brother the volume of writings edited by Essex Hemphill and the late Joseph Beam.

Sharon Bridgforth arrived in Austin in the late 1980s to start her own next chapter. She found the space and support to begin her writing career. Sharon started root wy’mn4 theatre company in 1993:

“I was already touring with root wy’mn and the very first show we did (love/rituals & rage) was in Austin; I produced it at the old Vortex theatre. Michael Barnes and other folks wrote about it and that opened space for people to connect with it and with me. Austin in those days? It was just super easy to access people. People were open and engaged and curious and people were doing such interesting things and they would reach out. Vicky reached out and said ‘hey do you as root wy’mn want to produce a show here?’ and I said yes. We then engaged in a co-production. It was all a yes. An invitation. A welcoming. How can we help? This is your home. I had so much respect for all of them and what they were doing that I just stepped through the threshold.”

The play that Frontera was producing just prior to our work was Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven.

Vogel was a huge force as an out lesbian Jewish artist and radical educator– an unflinching warrior for change who walked her talk everyday. She had invited Shay to Brown to get her MFA. The playwrights Paula taught and championed were making their ways into the field, confronting the entrenched structures and behaviors keeping gates locked and art exclusive. She, and Aishah Rahman, who joined her as a Playwriting professor in 1992, instilled in all the artists 4

Photo: root wy’mn - love/rituals & rage photo by Rita DeBellis, 1993. Archive of Sharon Bridgforth. ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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they worked with a sense of the long-haul nature of the fight. Shay’s plays, which unambiguously centered the capaciousness of Black women/Queer folk found fertile ground at Brown and offered the American theatre seed packets of Black Queer agency.

Shay’s Square Blues, for example, could well have been written today, dealing as it does with intergenerational conflict, political protest, state repression, intersectional identity, and the desire for internal and societal liberation. Vicky Boone was living the kinds of creative experimentation and socio-political commitments espoused by Paula and Aishah. Vicky had produced Shay’s Talking Bones in 1994, and was all aboard for her new play Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream. She then read my play Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings and called me up to say that she wanted to produce both together. When Shay and I learned that Sharon’s piece was happening too? Please. Sharon agreed to be our dramaturg, and Sonja Parks who would star in no mo blues agreed to assistant direct our double bill. To quote no mo blues:

it was on

the biggest two preacha-four-choir-twelve deacon/high rolln broom-jump of all time

Love for us was seeded deep in our marrow and responded to the invitation of one another’s presence like shoots to light.5 We loved one another as an act of recognition and recollection. There was tremendous risk in retrospect. No-one was absent from their histories. Everyone carried scars from our personal pasts. But we all were in an active relationship with our agency individually and collectively.

Sonja Parks reflected, “the thing that I remember most about that time is that we found each other somehow, someway, like last time we all... as we were about to poof and go to dust, we said see you then, meet you there… we kept that promise. We found each other.” The overwhelming feeling was what I could only call supportive curiosity. We were clear but not rigid. Vicky did not want to control us. She wanted us to bloom. And we all did. In our writing, Sharon and Shay and I set out our core questions: How might a ritual for Oshun meet the structure of the blues dramaturgically? How can desire transform 5

Photo: Shay Youngblood (le ) and Daniel Alexander Jones (right), Providence, RI 1992. Author’s archive. ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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trauma and lead to liberation? How can the filaments of family history, severed through violence and willful forgetting, be reconnected to open portals for ancestral communication? These questions were by us, for us, about us. And the artists assembled to collaborate with us were willing to go in, to ask their own questions, voice the contradictions, and listen for the impulses from the ocean floor of their own knowing.

We were invited into Frontera. We in turn invited everyone into a process rooted in what I’d call Sovereign Black Queerness. That called upon everyone to be mighty real.

We opted for what Toni Morrison called “interest, curiosity, and human connection”. A free place is not stumbled upon, it is claimed and embodied by choice.

That Frontera became a home for this work made sense. A theatre of radical hospitality is a deliberate choice. It says come in, says your presence here is necessary, says to artists here are the keys to come and go, says we assume we will all be changed by one another’s presence, and that is the point, says what is ours is yours, and the structures we have in place are aligned in service to develop, present, and promote what you discover. A theatre of radical hospitality centers process. A theatre of radical hospitality “makes wholly holy”. A theatre of radical hospitality knows there is no split when it comes to liberation. A theatre of radical hospitality is not trying to sell a product, but rather invite experience.

Its transparent terms of exchange center a commitment to continuance and community.

If you invite me over I’m likely to ask ‘can I bring anything?’ If that thing is a contribution in the form of a ticket, so be it; but isn’t it preferable to experience that as an investment in the community of which I am a recognized part, than it is to purchase and consume a product? A theatre of radical hospitality also says that those who cannot bring anything are still welcome to the party and those who can bring more can help out a little more. A theatre of radical hospitality is responsive to real life.6

For our double-bill, Vicky organized auditions for performers from across Texas. I asked for Cynthia Taylor-Edwards to be part of the cast a er working with her the year prior in Talking Bones. I wanted her to play two roles in my play, Shadowman (the ancestral presence haunting the character Harper’s dreams) and Mabel (the great aunt from South Carolina). Cynthia was o en cast as the Mama in any number of kitchen-sink dramas, and we were both psyched by the idea of her getting to stretch out as an actor. Clinton Sam, a vital actor with an incisive gaze would be the father in Earthbirths. The other cast members rounding out the show were Joyia D. Bradley, full of enthusiasm and emotional Theatres born of movements were already this way: like Penumbra Theatre Company and Pillsbury House Theatre in the Twin Cities. Theater Offensive in Boston. WOW Café in NYC. Teatro Campesino and Cornerstone in California. root wy’mn was born of Sharon’s own determination to center southern Black lesbian culture.

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liquidity would play Tabitha the orphaned sister caring for her brother with AIDS in Black Power Barbie and Mr. Uncle, the mile-a-minute family historian in Earthbirths.

Cyndi Williams would play the narcissistic white therapist in Black Power Barbie and the mother in Earthbirths; Cyndi’s bon mots dropped like ripe figs and kept us all in stitches. The challenge was finding the actors who would play Jackson and Paolo/Madonna in Black Power Barbie and Harper and Angelito in Earthbirths. These characters were out and proud. There would be love scenes–with kissing!

The actors would need to embody sexuality as an integral part of who these folks were and tap desire as central to their sense of wholeness. We’d love one talented actor a er another and ask, casually, “you’re willing to kiss another man onstage, right?” He’d high tail it out of the room. Repeat.

Repeat. Finally out of desperation we cast an actor from Houston recommended to Vicky. One down, one to go with three days le . I called Laurie Carlos in NYC and begged “Lore, please, do you have anybody you could send us?” She laughed her angelic trickster’s been-waiting-for-you-to-call laugh and said, “yes, his name is Brian.”7 A phone call to Queens and a plane ticket later, Brian Liem, a lithe, adventurous and passionate dancer/actor, showed up the night of the first rehearsal, suitcase in hand to the Austin State Hospital where Frontera rehearsed all their plays in space for free. That the “insane asylum” notorious for the lobotomies given “hysteric” women (black and white) was the place where we made our work felt somehow like divine recompense (we hollered to their spirits on the daily). The room buzzed as Sonja led warmups and Sharon spoke on the necessity of considering our relationship to the ancestors as we entered the process together. When we got to the first love scene, the actor from Houston paused, “I don’t think they would really kiss”. And there went another one. He drove back to Houston that night. We laughed because we knew something better had to be in store. The very next day, Vicky got a call. Daniel Dodd Ellis, a sweet-home country cousin with a barbecue baritone, who’d just graduated from Southwestern University Photo: Cynthia Taylor-Edwards (seated) and Brian Liem in Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings.

Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1995. Photo by Bret Brookshire. From the author’s archive.

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auditioned and was a shoe-in. Daniel’s chemistry with Brian and Joyia was off the charts and the whole ensemble went “click”. We looked around the room. It was a multiracial, multicultural, multi-errythang crew. We were rendered fully legible to one another. And we got to work. Sonja Parks said it best:

“It was hot. Hot in the sense of temperature, yes. But, hot in the sense of when the fish grease is ready! Some shit is fitna happen. It’s going to get goooood! As things got dropped in the grease it just got better and better and better. For me it was relief, honestly, that “I ain’t crazy”. That there are others like me who believe that lineages can be carried in other than the blood and the blood. So that as we are working in the art, and doing these things, and combining them with cell memory of rituals that we’ve maybe never been a part of but it just seems right… that idea of “this is bigger than me”, of “my gi does not belong to me”. There are people out here who believe that this can be something more. This is a catalyst, a vehicle.

Not just “I’m going to make a play” but this is a thing that reaches all the way back and all the way forward and connects everything on a continuum and I’ve found people who are part of that continuum and look, I ain’t crazy, cuz they’re doing it too!”

Theatrical jazz views each player as central to the compositional process. We move from the belief in right timing. The interior matrix of an individual player meets the work and its invitations. What needs to be explored, what needs to be revealed, and, potentially, what needs to be transformed is all offered up. Long before popular talk of epigenetics, we worked with concepts of blood memory. The plays shared stories of healing intergenerational trauma and entering new conversations through utterance, conjure, witnessing, and courageous acts of love. But it is not solely about the player’s journey, it is also about how the work is transformed by the player. As Octavia Butler wrote in Parable of the Sower, a book we all had read by that point, “All that you touch you change.

All that you change changes you.” That invitation is too intense for some (like our Houston actor), cuz everyone must risk. But that risk is key to liberatory exploration and expression.

All three pieces unfolded in overlapping landscapes of memory and the present moment. Sharon staged no mo blues in a bare space with a few carefully selected ritual objects. For the other two pieces, scenic designer Kimberlee Koym-Murtiera (née Kim Koym) created a stunning installation. Influenced by Romare Bearden and the inky tones of jazz art, she made the space into a modular collage that adapted to the specifics of each show. Notable were the layers of saturated blue that moved on a breath from pedestrian to otherworldly, and a huge day-glo handmade poster of Angela Davis. ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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Old-school slide projectors factored in with images created by Bret Brookshire, and Scott Segar’s lights became our transtemporal guide along with Kevin Freedman’s haunting score. Everyone took meticulous care with their work, especially our indefatigable stage manager, Jeanine Lisa. Everyone brought a generosity of spirit.

When collaborators are truly welcomed for their full range of insight and not just employed out of a narrow sense of utility, they offer gold to the process.

-no mo blues-

no mo blues was a ceremonial and poetic exploration of love, spirituality and personal transformation centering stories of women who bore the badges and the costs of their self-definition. Some of the women are living and some are dead. Some are named while others are not. They flow through–many and one at once. Bridgforth’s experiences as a child of the Great Migration who’d spent most of her life in Los Angeles before moving to Austin, and as a working-class artist committed to community shaped her relationship to art-making and to her audiences:

“I came from working as a community organizer; we used art as a vehicle for social justice to get people to access services like the street outreach when we were doing HIV testing and early intervention service work. I was with that very first wave of folks that were doing that work in the streets and in communities in Austin and I was trained by people who were of the community. When I was thinking about no mo blues and how to get my audience in there, some of my natural relationships were from the community. I wanted it to be an intergenerational experience of Black people from Austin that came in. So when I asked Deborah [Duncan] to open the show with singing, I knew she would bring her audience with her. Which was Black church folks. And many of them were closeted Black gay people who were very active and pretty much pillars of the church. Some of them were not Queer at all. They did not know what they were coming to see. But they got up in there and with open arms and all of their questions, they were full in.”

no mo blues opened while we were in rehearsal for the other two shows. We all attended opening night. Sister Deborah Duncan stood before the houselit audience packed like cute summer sardines in the tight rows and welcomed everybody in a so voice, “how y’all doin’ this evening?” We were all rapt as she opened her mouth and a booming voice poured out: “Well, well, well, my sooouuul needs a fixin’! Well, well, well, my sooouuul needs a fixin’! Fixin’ at the beautiful pearly gates!” We started hollering and the house lights hadn’t even come down. When they did, Sonja Parks moved onto the stage from ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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shadow with a vessel full of salt. She poured it in a steady-streamed circle; it hissed like brushes on cymbals as she intoned the first lines:

her back was against my chest. my arms pressed round her. we sat in a corner/on the kitchen floor. she was quiet still/like she was listening to something-something i couldn’t hear the sweating and shaking had stopped i thanked god needing a miracle. something pulled at us she smiled/moved her lips real slow i knew she was talking to death

Y’all got to get this straight tho… Imagine Shango fixed his eyes and thrust out his hand and the lightning swept down crack–right there–like that–and up sprung his mirror image just as fierce as you wanna be, all electric in the eyes and thunderous in the voice, and he was pretty pleased and so threw that new being a handful of gold so she’d shimmer a little bit more just for points. Imagine that? That’s Sonja Parks.8 Sonja was the one woman in the one woman show that was no mo blues. But she was in fact every woman and there was a whole community in that show. Sonja played them all, de ly, distinctly, with fervor. She could pass for Oshun, whose piece this was, per Sharon’s dedication, but that lightning was always crackling behind her eyes. Each piece of story was like a brush stroke gesture, the whole coming into relief over the course of the evening.

The holy-ghost moment of no mo blues, when folks would start shouting back at the stage, is the outrageous and arresting tale of bull-jean releasing her attachment to toxicity in relationships. saffira louise goode is getting married to a man, but bull-jean is her lover. When the preacher asks if anyone has an objection, bull-jean stands up and delivers a heart-stopping interruption. It concludes thusly: Photos: video stills of Sonja Parks in root wy’mn’s production of no mo blues at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 1995. (There are no archival photos of the Austin production). Archive of Sharon Bridgforth.

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bull-jean look safirra in the eye/real hard say i may not be able to promise you fancy rangs and furs and thangs but i guarantee that when we kiss you'll hear the Angels sang and if that ain't enough to fill yo Life with joy

and comfort

i release you na lovve.

her turn and walk out. safirra pass out boom all up in the sanctuary lik somebody donn snipped she cord-a-Life.

“She’s the deepest part of me that has always been the one who has led me to my own healing.

That turning point in the story with saffira was a turning point for me too. bull-jean helps me to embody love, to learn how to love myself, to learn how to be in love. When I grow in those areas I grow in other areas of my life.” - Sharon Bridgforth

Many a face in that audience was wet with tears, hearts racing, and palms gripped neighbor-to-neighbor. bull-jean embodied the bravery we all knew in our core was necessary to walk away from all our limited and limiting stories, stuck circumstances and people and to walk toward what was ours to discover. It was scary. It was enlivening. Sharon reminded us that again and again, rippling across time and lifetimes, that action of choosing your freedom was ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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happening. We are not alone. We are witnessed. sassy b gonn, an elder, witnesses bull jean:

sassy smile/take bull-jean's face cup-in-both-hans look the gurl in the eyes say

you know/you always was my favorite we cut from da same rug/we.

bull-jean smile/say

yes ma'am.

–Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream–

The works of art I have cherished have disoriented me; I engaged them not for confirmation of what I know but rather for expansion of my consciousness. Presenting work on its own terms promotes a healthy ecosystem. It lays ground for those unfamiliar with the nuances of its sovereign self-regard to enter with curiosity as their guide. That emphasis on supporting creative autonomy always seemed to be at the heart of Vicky’s thinking, and was certainly a huge factor in what made Austin at that time such a fertile field. The term “universality” has too o en been used as a cudgel to relegate to the margins work that does not center the white gaze, unified plot structures, or traditional unifocal heroic journeys. As Lorraine Hansberry famously noted, “in order to create the universal you must pay very great attention to the specific.” In our work, the specific congregational dynamics at work–in the material, the collaborative processes, and in the performances (including the real-time relationship to audience/participants) demonstrate a cosmological understanding of how multiple elements function within a dynamic whole. I’ll say it again for the folks in the back: the three of us conjured whole people who loved themselves who understood themselves as inextricably connected to others, and who moved from a call-and-response with the universe of which they were a part. All three of our plays dealt with charged subjects and painful episodes, but centered the agency, resilience and vision of the characters. And all three plays reflected the complex, contradictory, and deliciously heterodoxical worlds that we three playwrights inhabited. So, we were talking first, as Toni Morrison said, “to us”. Sharing from that place with others was a welcome expansion rather than a distortion or diminution.

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Shay described her play: Tabitha and her younger brother Jackson battle for Black Power Barbie as they relive vivid and frightening memories, as the children of revolutionaries, in therapy sessions. As adults, Tabitha remains psychologically wounded, living in the past, while Jackson faces the reality of living with AIDS. Jackson’s lover Paolo enters the story and stays with him through his death. Then Shay called for the performer who played Paolo to become Madonna, a butch lesbian who becomes Tabitha’s lover a er a wild flirtation in a shoe store. The play lived in a sizzling liminal space between colliding a ermaths (their parents’ murder, Jackson’s impending death, Tabitha’s multiple abandonments) and burgeoning possibilities (the patient persistence of their lovers, new choices, and glorious pushback against all limits). In one session, Tabitha’s therapist blurts out:

THERAPIST Tabitha why are you so angry?

TABITHA You’ve never been Black have you?9

Photo: Brian Liem (le ) and Daniel Dodd Ellis (right) in Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream.

Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1995. Photo by Bret Brookshire. Author’s archive.

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The sight of Jackson cradled in Paolo’s tender arms, and the sound of their close voices was a missing puzzle piece dropping into place–that sweet love that is our why. Their tenderness was an energy field between them undulating so ly as they spoke:

PAOLO What’s this?

JACKSON A dream catcher.

PAOLO What does it do with the dreams you don’t want?

JACKSON A great winged spider swoops down and eats them alive.

PAOLO I want all my dreams, even the bad ones. They guide me, tell me what I’m afraid of so I can prepare myself. They help me understand where I’m going. I dreamed about your sister last night.

JACKSON What did you dream?

PAOLO (Animated) The three of us, me, you, your sister, were walking around in a zoo. One one of the paths we came face to face with a gathering of brightly colored birds. They started flying around our heads, circling closer and closer until we could touch their feathers. They folded us beneath their wings and flew us to a garden filled with calla lilies and birds of paradise. There was a loud noise like thunder and when I looked around you were gone, the birds were gone. Your sister and I were alone but we could hear you, we could hear you singing an opera.

JACKSON So you were safe and I was singing.

PAOLO In Italian.

JACKSON You’re a great tutor, but my Italian still sucks.

PAOLO I have the most vivid dreams when I sleep with you. This is an amazing bed.

JACKSON It’s my mother’s bed.

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PAOLO No shit. Fucking in your mother’s bed takes courage.

JACKSON She’s dead so it doesn’t matter.

Shay says, “I wanted to talk about the bigness of love. Certainly the power of love to heal. But how big and how wide and how deep it was. We reached out to people certainly as a way of healing our grief but as a way of sharing our joy, too. That piece came out of a time when one got the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS? That was a death sentence. I wanted to write about how love can even surpass death. Even if the person is not there the spirit is there. And as hard as love can be sometimes, it’s always worth stepping towards love. Even if you think it’s gone, get up and reach! It’s essential to us. [Tabitha] reached out of her deep grief for love. You continue to love.

TABITHA10 Why do you sleep with my brother when you know he’s gonna die?

PAOLO Because I love him.

TABITHA You’re not afraid to touch him?

PAOLO There is danger when you don’t touch. The first year a er I le the University my brother and I took a trip to Spain with some boys we knew. We traveled together every spring. The first spring Marcel was missing. Then Isaac and Hector died. Then my brother Adrian. The two of us le were too sad to live but too scared to kill ourselves. It was very difficult to continue living , but we found ways.

TABITHA How?

Photo: Joyia D. Bradley in Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream. Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1995.

Photo by Bret Brookshire. Author’s archive.

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PAOLO I keep loving. I’m not afraid to say goodbye anymore.

The play concludes with scenes of Tabitha and her lover Madonna leaning into a playful process of getting to know one another intimately, as Jackson’s ghost looks on.

When Madonna goes a step too far by reading Tabitha’s diaries, it looks as though Tabitha is going to end the relationship, pushing back on Madonna’s desire to fill the holes le by all the losses and “be everything” to her. But in a simple act of transformative vulnerability, Tabitha drops the ever-present Black Power Barbie doll she has carried since childhood, and chooses Madonna. The Therapist turns to us at that moment and asks directly: “of all the possibilities, how do you choose to love?”11

–Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings–

HARPER My father in the black chair.

Feet, hand, chin, eyes almost closed.

I'm a shadow on the stairs behind Don't know even if he know I'm there.

Just know him cause she's here.

Her voice li s out the record player in the corner, with the scratch and pop of needle in groove.

(SINGS) Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible says and it still is news,

Photo: Daniel Dodd Ellis (le ) as Madonna and Joyia D. Bradley as Tabitha in Black Power Barbie in Hotel de Dream. Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1996. Photo by Bret Brookshire. Author’s Archive.

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mama may have.

Only time I know my father... she haunts the room, makes the breathing easy, makes the so ness on his face, slow and steady.

Eyes closed almost...

And it still is news...

Then blue and almost not at all, the sound comes from him.

Bass notes catch in the wood. Mama may have...

Notes set in my eyes. Papa may have...

Sound of my father and her together.

Flood the room full night comes on First drops of rain fall.

I am safe.

Something about my father and Billie makes sense.

Something holy for which there are no words, only sound.

Earthbirths was a haunting. An Afromystical palimpsest. My father’s family had fled South Carolina in the Great Migration. Other than two memorable visits from his Aunt Mabel and her sister-friend Anna Mae I had no direct contact with the living family members who still lived there. The Joneses’ talk of the south was contained and constrained. That history was one of many palpable gaps in my family’s origin stories.

While much of my white mother’s extended family had shunned her for marrying my father, she had an easy recall of her family tree and my brother and I learned names and saw photographs of relatives we’d never meet. My father’s siblings were a big part of our upbringing; their voices and mannerisms etched into our memories. But their talk of the past had dead ends with sharp edges and “Do Not Disturb” signs. Along with oblique talk of purported Indigenous ancestors, there were names dropped here and there that seemed radioactive. I had always felt presence behind the veil. By my early twenties I came to understand work in theatre and performance as a process of engaging with that presence, especially as I learned more about Black prophetic traditions, and witnessed the almost-shamanistic work of artists who were willing to move into realms of performance that escaped their full control. My compositional interests, shaped by a ©2020 Daniel Alexander Jones

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years-long infusion of so-called astral jazz, leaned toward the associative and layered. I wanted my plays to be li -off sites, where the live experience and its real-time flutters would take precedence over prefabricated moments and where I could speak to aspects of audiences’ intelligence other than their logic. I would later realize that I had been about the business of building altars. I was making the space to commune with the presence behind the veil.12

Harper has seen a ghost. Angelito is not impressed with his response to throw candy at it and is steadily laughing:

ANGELITO Ain’t that much sweet tooth in the world!

HARPER I’m telling you she was looking out at me from the closet and I hollered and ran out the room.

That’s all I got to say.

ANGELITO I don’t get it.

Photo: Brian Liem as Harper in Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings. Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1995. Photo by Bret Brookshire.

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HARPER When she came through the wall, I thought she probably wanted something. So I gave her some candy.

ANGELITO You told old girl to shut up. That’s what all that candy is for, shit. That’s very interesting to me.

HARPER Why you laughing?

ANGELITO Cuz you told her to...

Shut. Up. You didn’t want to hear what she had to say. She looks like your people in the eyes.

She probably came to drop some information.

You couldn’t listen.

That’s all that was.

HARPER What was I supposed to do? You would have done the same shit. She spun me out.

ANGELITO When you looking for answers you got to be willing to hear them when they come.

HARPER I can’t use those kinds of answers.

ANGELITO Then you need to buy some more candy. A shitload more candy and lay it all up around you like a wall, cuz the answers are coming like rain.

It was a generational thing. Parents who didn’t want to pass the traumas on or who wanted their children to be, and feel, unfettered. For those of us who came of age at the waning edge of the Civil Rights Movement it could sometimes feel like we were unmoored as we played at integration. We were the “Free to Be You and Me” crew, who took sincere if uncertain steps across borders to practice some incomplete shadow version of beloved community; all the while we were haunted by nameless ghosts, by deep sea pulses of memory and flashes of insight that were older than we were. The dangers of curating history are many. One of the greatest is an inability to recognize patterns reasserting themselves in plain sight. If you don’t know what happened, no

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matter how violent and fearsome, you might not catch the repetition in time. In Earthbirths, Harper wades through the ripples of silence to encounter an act of racial terrorism in his family’s history down South, a story carried by the Shadowman behind the veil. But he also, by doing so, opens a portal to receive the sweet gi s of autonomy and self-liberation that fueled these ancestors including his great Aunt–the spirit who’d come through the wall in the scene above. At the end of the piece, she offers the following suggestion:

MABEL Just one thing, sweetheart, don’t look in the mirror and see yourself.

–see?–

This most recent iteration of open season on Black and Brown bodies in 2020 ignited a powerful global outcry. In the sway of this heady, volatile, historic rush, some long-dormant transformative potential is shuddering above ground even as an almost incalculable grief rests on our hearts. It is not an accident. Those of us who have always seen the systems for what they are have daily prayed the shi would happen. And we did like Shay used to always say, when you pray, move your feet. The American Theatre is now facing its own reckoning. Public conflicts around historical inequities, exclusions and abuses based on race, gender, sexuality and ability in popular white-run institutions are juxtaposed against artists and socially conscious institutions seeking to amplify self-determination. For as many years as you can track back there have been those who have resisted: grinding glass, marching into hails of bullets, deconstructing and decolonizing through de words and deeds, and generally letting folk catch hands.

There have been those who have emancipated themselves, following star maps, listening for the call of future selves in wee hours, leaving behind all they knew in leaps of faith.

Throughout there have been those who dared to practice something else. In abandoned lots. In fields deemed barren. In the spaces between. We have dared to love. And when we say love we mean revolutionary love. The carmine red spray paint slash kind. The life-death blood-red flow-again kind. The jagged lightning strikes kind. The torn-edged sepia photo saved from the trasheap kind. The fever funk of too many days in the sun kind. The stolen kiss under streetlamp kind. The first-sight heart-flutters recognize-you kind. The honey on bronze belly kind. The imperfect, willing to be yourself unmasked kind. The reach inside and pull that still-screaming rage into the air kind. The love of lovers who laid down their arms on stolen land under the stretched-wide blue sky; no rock to hide from the violent past; just a simple yes and again yes, ancient-future

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sojourners, shapeshi ers, and sovereign souls, in the tiny building, on the corner of 43rd and Guadalupe, in the burning hot summer of 1995. 13

“The light shone on that moment. It was filled with grace. Seamless. I think of the blue, the colors, the characters. That’s the beauty of theatre, too. I didn’t realize when I wrote Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery that I was creating an opportunity for 7, 8, 9 Black women to become a community, bringing all that they had with them, and a erward people continued to be in community. I think that’s what happened with [Revolutionary Love]. There was this community created of people that allowed them into becoming. They were living certain truths. They were able to, through the process of being in that play, people carried that, they took it into the world.”

- Shay Youngblood

–Coda–

I sometimes cry on planes. I mean like cry-cry. They are liminal spaces moving through liminal space and I feel all the things. I am closer to the unbent rays of light and to Space therefore I am closer to home. That is the feeling of Blackness down below. That is the force of Black Queerness reaching up. That is the risk of moving into charged places with people willing to experiment with ways to be free together, not by ignoring or minimizing our identities, but by understanding their complex truths as light sources and committing to forming constellations, in real time, with one another’s capacities.

That is our sacred dance. Reverse refraction. That is the proof of us before and beyond form. That time I did. Cry on the plane. The American Airlines F-100 plane, window seat over the wing, from the old Austin airport up to Minneapolis. Leaving the heat of the Sun and the heat of that creative crucible. I still bear the marks of it as some opposite things to scars. Glorious maps in the margins of my inside seams. I feel them now. Pulsing. It’s an odd sense of return, 25 years later, stripped of any illusion, standing yet again atop shards of shattered dreams. Will there be a sudden summer downpour?

Will we see the thin green fronds press themselves up, swell, then burst with a frenzy of color like they did in the empty lot near that theatre on the corner? Before and beyond Photo: Brian Liem (le ) and Shay Youngblood (right). Outside Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, 1995.

Author’s Archive.

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this time. In this unsafe trembling now. I will call this calling, this (re)memory what it is.

Evidence of revolutionary love.

“Be in the room you want to be in. It’s really pretty simple. You can stand up and walk out the door. Or you can open the door and invite more people in. You can change the room or you can change the room you’re in. Our bodies propel us. It’s really simple on some level. And you don’t have to know the answer to start.” - Vicky Boone14

Daniel Alexander Jones is currently completing the manuscript of Waves, a hybrid memoir/narrative, from which this essay is excerpted. The first collection of his plays and performance texts, Love Like Light, will be published by 53rd State Press as soon as the pandemic allows. www.danielalexanderjones.com

Photo: Framed prints hang on the wall of Vicky Boone’s home, Austin, 2020 of Cynthia Taylor-Edwards as photographed by Bret Brookshire for Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings, 1995.

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