Throughout, the Graces stood witness to these symbolic struggles, repeating mournful laments and singing with apparent heartbreak at the men’s fates. As he drifted about, defenseless, one of the Graces joined him, rocking the ball to and fro like a fretful mother who knows what awaits her child, the slim odds, her guiding hand the only thing standing between him and rolling off of the edge of the stage. In a later sequence, another black man floated in a transparent plastic bubble, rolling around the stage, kicking and tormented like a baby struggling to be born. The man evoked countless images replayed on news and Facebook feeds everywhere, of black men fleeing, shot, like game, in the back, and at once the viewer was brought into the exhaustion of the man’s experience, treading water, running in place. From whom? To where? It wasn’t clear, but something was gaining on him, it seemed, given the Graces’ urgent refrain. In an early scene, a black man appears on a treadmill, running. The pathos of the contemporary African American experience was foregrounded in Grace Notes-a multimedia odyssey of stark tableaus, at once vivid, realistic, and dreamlike-through beautiful abstract imagery, music, and choreography. Aja Monet, Alicia Hall Moran, Eisa Davis, and Imani Uzuri. Performance view, College of Charleston Theater, South Carolina, June 4, 2016. These tensions are marked by… the killings of young black men, and the tragic events of the Emanuel Nine.Ĭarrie Mae Weems, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, 2016. Likewise, Grace Notes examines the wider social implications of tensions at work in communities across America. But the wider community refuses her her right to justice, and to peace, is denied. “There are only a handful of stories in the world: the difference often lies in the telling,” Weems writes in the director’s notes.Īfter working on Grace Notes for months it occurred to me I was telling the story of Antigone, wherein an innocent man dies by unjustified means and his sister fights for the right to bury him honorably. Only three weeks later, news would break of the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, cast across our sundry, constant media streams. Only days after the second and final performance at the College of Charleston Theater, Pulse Nightclub would be attacked by a lone gunman, principally targeting queer people of color-a massacre that resulted in forty-nine dead, not including the gunman himself. Grace Notes called for reflection on these tragedies and raised questions, whose timing could hardly have been more significant, about how we go on surviving them. Last month, at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, Weems took on this subject with Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, a work produced by the festival and dedicated to commemorating victims of the shootings at the Mother Emanuel African Episcopal Church in June of last year and the many black and brown people who have lost their lives to police brutality. In the wake of recent carnage across America, one might wonder where grace is hiding, or, more pointedly, what grace could possibly yield. The trio formed a Greek chorus, repeating in unison, “Always convicted, always charged, always stopped.” To the sound of a five-piece jazz band, rising from the orchestra pit, Weems was soon joined on stage by spoken-word artist Aja Monet and playwright Carl Hancock Rux, poets and her guides of sorts, and eventually by three Graces-Eisa Davis, Alicia Hall Moran, and Imani Uzuri. A footlight cast her long, crisp shadow against a blank white screen, like a sigil on a blank white page.

Photo: William Struhs.ĬARRIE MAE WEEMS sat upright at a typewriter, her back to the audience. Carrie Mae Weems, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, 2016.

Footlight theater charleston