Tag: African American Heritage Center

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Arts Culture

History repeats: Vinegar Hill ushers in Charlottesville Players Guild’s season

Terésa Dowell-Vest says the time is right for a revival of Vinegar Hill, a play she premiered at Live Arts in 1999 to honor the residents of Charlottesville’s razed Black neighborhood. 

Two decades ago, Terésa Dowell-Vest embarked on a research project. After attending grad school in California, the actor and playwright set out to collect the oral histories of family and community members in her hometown of Charlottesville. The product of this research was 1999’s Vinegar Hill, a play named after the town’s once-thriving Black neighborhood. Destroyed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, Vinegar Hill and its former residents are memorialized in Dowell-Vest’s work.

Today, the play is part of Charlottesville history—but it’s about to return to center stage. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Charlottesville Players Guild, itself a revival of local Black theater, will kick off its 2021 Amplify season with a four-day symposium focused on Vinegar Hill. The symposium will be conducted virtually from January 15 to 18, and includes not just a reading of the play, but also a multimedia presentation of Vinegar Hill histories and a panel discussion about the neighborhood’s destruction.

The Vinegar Hill revival is a natural fit for Amplify’s opening event. All of Amplify’s productions in the 2021 season are the works of Black playwrights who either have roots in Charlottesville or who currently live and work in the city.

This is a break from traditional programming for the Guild—its 2017 revival featured a production of Fences, and programming has consistently included August Wilson’s work. But CPG’s artistic director, Leslie M. Scott-Jones, rejects the ideas of tradition and normalcy. “I don’t like the term ‘new normal,’ because there isn’t a normal,” she says, referring in part to the modified reality COVID has imposed on the world. “We have been conditioned to believe that there is a certain set of circumstances that constitute ‘normal.’”

Normalcy, Scott-Jones explains, is constantly in flux for artists, and especially for Black artists. “We are used to adjusting things about ourselves in order to survive,” she says. In order for the CPG to survive during the pandemic, programming has gone virtual—a shift that Scott-Jones says resulted in her decision to take a break from Wilson’s plays. “I didn’t want to lessen the impact of the work by doing it virtually.”

Dowell-Vest’s play will enjoy its first revival since its initial run at Live Arts. Although more than 20 years have passed, the playwright has clear memories of her preliminary research and what inspired her to start it. “I remember as a kid hearing my grandmother say, ‘It’s a shame what they did downtown,’” Dowell-Vest says. “That’s what I kept hearing over and over growing up.”

When she returned to Charlottesville in the late ’90s, it was as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ first director of the African American Heritage Center. Dowell-Vest says she had always considered herself an artist and performer rather than a historian. In her new position, “I had tools…I had people who understood research.” She used these tools to delve further into the story of Vinegar Hill, to better comprehend the undercurrent of history that ran through her formative years in Charlottesville.

The project was a difficult and delicate one, Dowell-Vest explains. “People—Black, white, or otherwise—are very protective of their stories.” But through a combination of persistence and patience, Dowell-Vest was eventually able to collect enough stories about Vinegar Hill to fit them into a larger, dramatized narrative.

“I think I was reinvesting myself in my hometown,” she says of the project, as well as giving the city a “reminder” of the community it had physically torn down but failed to spiritually destroy. It’s time for another reminder, Dowell-Vest says.

She lives outside of Houston now, teaching at Prairie View A&M University, but visits Charlottesville occasionally (she’ll be here virtually for the Vinegar Hill discussion panel). Every time she returns, “Charlottesville looks completely different.” She attributes some of the change to “growth and evolution,” but also blames “greed, and sprawl, and decimating communities that have been generationally residential.”

Dowell-Vest sees the Vinegar Hill story played out again and again to varying degrees. She’s reviving her play, she says, to give “younger people context about where they are and the work that still needs to be done.”

Hailed as a local, modern classic, Vinegar Hill will be a hard act to follow. But Scott-Jones has a promising 2021 lineup—one that includes Thirty-Seven, a play of her own creation.

“I started writing it to answer a question for myself,” she says. “What makes a person, specifically a Black person, decide to become an activist?”

The title, she says, refers to the creation of the 9-1-1 emergency call in New York City, spurred by the murder of a Black woman outside her apartment building. “There were 37 people at home in her building who heard her calling for help and did nothing.”

Following Thirty-Seven is Ti Ames’ See About the Girls, a continuation of Amiri Baraka’s classic The Slave. David Vaughn Straughn’s Tanesha focuses on the videotaping of fatal police brutality against a Black person and the protagonist’s indecision about how to use the footage. Aiyana Marcus’ She Echoes on the Vine, the season’s closing play, is an exploration of one Black woman’s ancestry.

Although Scott-Jones is unsure which of these plays will be totally virtual and which might have live audiences—the season runs through November—she predicts Amplify will be a success, and a testament to the power of Black artists in Charlottesville. “[The plays] are all very different, but they’re all…telling the story of Black life,” she says. “I’m really hoping this season is a beacon for any other Black playwright out there.”

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Arts

Black Mac puts a contemporary look on Macbeth

With Black Mac, Ti Ames directs one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays in a new light. Photo by Tristan Williams.

Ti Ames loves William Shakespeare. Or rather, Ames loves the plays of William Shakespeare.

It’s a love that started when Ames played a fairy in The Tempest at Live Arts at age 9, and it grew when, at 16, Ames became the first black actor to win the English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition in 2012.

Now 23, Ames loves how Shakespeare’s verse feels alive like a heartbeat and its ability to “make people feel something more than they have ever felt” in a single moment.

Ames believes that Shakespeare wrote “to tell the stories that he wanted to tell,” malleable, universal stories that reveal our shared humanity.

With Black Mac, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s original retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a black aesthetic, which runs through July 29 at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Ames tells the story that Ames wants to tell.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about two Scottish soldiers, Macbeth and Banquo, who upon returning victorious from a battle are given three prophesies by three witches. The witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and king; they hail Banquo as the father of kings to come. Throughout the play, Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, obsess to the point of madness over the prophesies.

Macbeth isn’t Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (that’s Titus Andronicus), but it’s his greatest thriller. Most productions play up the blood, the gore, the ghosts and the madness. Not Black Mac. “This show is about what happens when you let greed take over and you don’t learn from that lesson,” says Ames, who developed Black Mac with guidance from actor, director, writer and Oberlin professor Justin Emeka. It’s less sensational, more embellished reality, performed in the round, with the house lights on and minimal set pieces and costumes.

Eleven black actors play Community Members who are cast in The Community’s annual production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (a clever mirroring of the Charlottesville Players Guild’s mission of fostering a community of black theater artists here in town). A single father and his son are cast as Banquo and his son, Fleance. Two best friends, one who made it out of the hood and one who did not, are cast as Malcolm, son of King Duncan, and Macduff, a soldier. Those members of The Community who Ames says “have told it the most”—black women—are cast as the three witches.

But the actors alone don’t make Black Mac black. “Blackness [influences] the story in every way,” says Ames.

The witches are goddesses dressed in white, three Yoruban Orishas, deities of the Yoruba people of various West African nations.

Lady Macbeth’s famous “unsex me here” monologue is an African dance in which she calls upon her ancestors for strength. Malcolm throws serious shade at Macbeth once he suspects Macbeth has killed King Duncan. The latter is Ames’ way of showing the importance of balancing sadness and humor, something Ames says Shakespeare’s plays—and black people—do both well and out of necessity.

While Ames has changed very few words in the play, it “has been completely reimagined in the black vernacular,” says Black Mac producer Leslie Scott-Jones, who plays the Community Member playing the role of the Orisha Oshun and a few smaller, one-off parts.

“That’s the great thing about working with Shakespeare,” says Scott-Jones. “It is literally a universal language; you can bend it, twist it to your will. Once you understand what’s being said, you can put any spin on it.”

“Surprisingly,” reciting Shakespeare’s verse is “a lot like spitting raps,” says Louis Hampton, who plays the Community Member cast as Macduff. Hampton’s one half of the local hip-hop group The Beetnix, and he says once he got familiar with the message, the meter and the words, it flowed.

Black Mac adds unique significance to one of Macbeth’s most dominant themes. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth want children and cannot have them. This fuels Macbeth’s jealousy of Banquo, a father who is told his descendants will be kings. In Black Mac, it’s not power, money or fame that haunts the couple—it’s the lack of a legacy, says Ames.

“For black people, that’s one of the most important things to us, that we have that history to look back on,” knowing that despite slavery, peonage, Jim Crow and more, black people have been able “to make something beautiful,” says Ames. Without a child, a legacy, Mac (played by David Vaughn Straughn) and Lady Mac (played by Richelle Claiborne) have “nothing to keep them going,” says Ames.

Ames knows that Black Mac is not what most people expect when they think of Shakespeare. That’s the point.

“I want people to start thinking differently about how we do theater. Because this should not be ‘the black version of Macbeth.’ It should be Macbeth. It should be Black Mac. It should be exactly what it is.” And forget what your English teacher might have implied, Ames says, because Shakespeare is for everyone.

Ames hopes audience members will exit the auditorium after the show saying, “I never thought of it like that.”

“No, you didn’t,” Ames would say to them with a smile. “And welcome.”

Black Mac

Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center

Through July 29

Categories
Arts

A mile in their shoes: Experience the Underground Railroad through photographs

Jeanine Michna-Bales’ exhibition “Through Darkness to Light” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through June 30. Courtesy of the artist.

“My fascination with the Underground Railroad began in elementary school,” says photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales in an email. “It was part of our school curriculum and I remember just being amazed that people had to go through this long journey in order to be free.” Michna-Bales, now based in Texas, grew up in the Midwest amid the unmarked paths of the Underground Railroad.

In March, her book, Through Darkness to Light, the culmination of 10 years’ worth of research and photographic documentation, was published. Twelve photographs from the collection, which imagines a possible route of nearly 1,400 miles from Louisiana to Canada, are now on display at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

Celebrate Juneteenth!

June 16

  • Talk by historian Anthony Cohen, founder of The Menare Foundation and the Button Farm Living History Center in Germantown, Maryland. Cohen traveled 1,200 miles from Maryland to Ontario in 1996, exploring the Underground Railroad.
  •  Libation Ceremony: A West African tradition that acknowledges the ancestors.
  • Tribute to Local Elders: “It’s a good opportunity to really consider those people that worked to underpin the African-American community,” says African American Heritage Center Director Andrea Douglas.

June 17

  • Jamal Millner Trio: Local musician plays various genres including jazz, funk and rock.
  • Yolanda Coles-Jones: Area singer, photographer and blogger performs her music.
  • Nikuyah Walker: Candidate for Charlottesville City Council performs her spoken word poetry.
  • Other performances include Big Lean, Nay Michelle, Kese, Yolanda Muhammad, BCBA Dance Team
    and DJ Flatline.

As the book and exhibition title suggest, these landscape photographs are dominated by darkness. This darkness invites closer examination of the scenes in what almost becomes an immersive experience, if such a thing is possible in two dimensions. The sensation is further enhanced by the descriptive narration of the tour guides in the JSAAHC’s Trailblazer program, a partnership with the City of Promise that trains local students to give exhibition tours.

One such guide is Bria Williams, a Washington, D.C. college student who is home for the summer. Conducting a recent tour, she draws attention to the light. While minimal until the journey’s end, it is visible in nearly every photograph. Standing in front of a photograph titled “The River Jordan,” Williams reminds visitors that if you’re a runaway slave you may not have access to a boat or know how to swim and says, “You’ve come so far already. Are you going to quit now?”

“We know nighttime was important to keep freedom-seekers unseen,” writes Michna-Bales. “I was aiming—as close as possible—for a first-person viewpoint. Light and dark draw you into a scene, and I tried to use that to highlight areas that I thought were important.”

It is almost as if history is wrapped around you like a blanket trying to make you understand all that has occurred on this given spot. Jeanine Michna-Bales

She sensed the force of history in these spaces as an almost physical weight as she tried to capture them. “I felt this most strongly in the South at the plantations,” says Michna-Bales. “It is almost as if history is wrapped around you like a blanket trying to make you understand all that has occurred on this given spot.”

Michna-Bales also became hyperaware “being out in rural locations in the middle of the night tapped into all of the senses. …The sounds were all-encompassing and mesmerizing, from the cicadas to coyotes baying in the distance, to thunderclaps from a storm and the sound of rain pelting the ground and the leaves. I came away from the project in awe of what these people went through for their freedom,” she says.

In the process, Michna-Bales also learned about white abolitionists who helped in the effort. “Out of this dark history, we see a diverse group of people working together to try to end the injustice of slavery,” says Michna-Bales, “thus creating America’s first civil rights movement. I hope that we can all use this part of our history and learn from it to help us navigate our way through the present into the future.”

On June 16 and 17, the JSAAHC will celebrate Juneteenth. The holiday, observed in 45 states, marks the day—June 19, 1865—on which the last enslaved people in the United States received word that slavery had been abolished. Andrea Douglas, director of the heritage center, says the “Through Darkness to Light” exhibition “really kind of dovetails with this notion of the implications of Juneteenth.”

Celebrants come from Charlottesville and the surrounding counties, too, Douglas says, “because this is one of the few sites, the few communities, that actually celebrates Juneteenth.”

While Juneteenth has been celebrated in Charlottesville for 17 years, this is only its second year at the Jefferson School. “We’ve kind of joined a network of communities,” Douglas says. “Many of them are sort of like family reunions, a calling of people back to the community, back to the place of their origin. And what’s most important about having it here at the Jefferson School is that, while we’re not the beginning, we’re certainly part of the origin story.”

Jeanine Michna-Bales’ exhibition “Through Darkness to Light” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through June 30.