Bonnie Gordon – C-VILLE Weekly

History matters: ‘Something wicked this way comes’

By Bonnie Gordon

For almost two years, Charlottesville has felt like Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth. So when I saw Black Mac, a radically black take on Shakespeare’s play about the violent hauntings of the past, it felt like a staging of collective memory, trauma, power, and space.

Directed by 23-year-old black Oberlin student Ti Ames, the production, with 11 black actors and actresses, put in counterpoint black vernacular and Shakespearean language.

Here in #Charlottesville, before the anniversary of the violent Unite the Right rally, it was impossible not to witness Black Mac and think that, for all his theatrical and operatic knowledge, Richard Spencer (a music major during his time at UVA who worked in German opera houses) could only borrow props, words, and gestures from the distant past. His attempt at staging Charlottesville was hollow and unoriginal. Black Mac’s mostly very young cast and their audience have, indeed, replaced you.

And it was hard not to think that Jason Kessler sounds like Macbeth with a life that is a “tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / signifying nothing.”

Missing, all too often from national media photos and stories about Charlottesville and of bigotry and evil (because that’s what it is) are stories of resistance, of powerful black institutions, and of creative power.

That’s the story of this production, and especially the place where it occurred, which insists that history matters not just when it’s violent and familiar, but also when it’s quiet and sustained—a long tone.

Black Mac occurred in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a space that has been a spiritual center for the African American community here for more than 125 years and is one of the few buildings that remained standing after the city demolished a thriving black community called Vinegar Hill.

It’s easy these days to know that in 1924 the Robert E. Lee statue (which last year’s rally was never about) was dedicated in a ceremony to the Confederate Lost Cause, photographs of which eerily resemble the assemblages of white nationalists we saw here last year. But more importantly in 1924, black Charlottesville parents petitioned the school board for a black high school.

While the Jefferson School had had a theater program from 1895 through the 1950s, the arts in Charlottesville remain a devastatingly segregated arena, and it starts with our children.

The night I saw Black Mac, the audience was small—38 people. But many of those people have worked to make sure all kids in this racist town have access to creative practice. These people and the institutions they run may not make the national news, but they matter.

“Something wicked this way comes.” If wicked means bad and violent, then the wicked something comes from the horrific hate unleashed by Donald Trump. Many writers have already had fun with Trump as Macbeth, a guy whose heinous narcissistic ambitions never let him admit defeat or fear even when the evidence shows otherwise. “I cannot taint with fear,” says MacTrump.

Macbeth takes advice from witches who stir up a mixture of paranoia and hate of the other that knows no bounds. Trump stirs up Central American kids in detention centers. He hates and fears the other so much that apparently he doesn’t mind killing its young.

But if “wicked” is something linked to magic, then we can find here and in many other spaces amazing powers of resistance and resilience. We saw that kind of wicked on this surreal anniversary weekend when the white nationalist theater of hate was replaced by a police state theater of the absurd.

Bonnie Gordon is a music professor at UVA.

Teaching moment: Renaissance tradition v. Title IX

While Charlottesville debates a petition to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a quieter controversy has been ongoing at UVA about a prominent work of art.

One day after Rolling Stone came out with its now discredited “A Rape on Campus” on November 19, 2014, the Cavalier Daily wrote about artist Lincoln Perry’s acclaimed mural in Old Cabell Hall, “The Student’s Progress,” which depicts fictitious student Shannon’s journey through the university.

“Props to the University for knowing how to take a joke,” said the Cavalier Daily about one wall on the left staircase depicting partying students.

Subsequent coverage of the mural was not so amused.

Less than a week later, UVA music professor Bonnie Gordon took aim at the mural in a piece she wrote for Slate titled, “The UVA gang rape allegations are awful, horrifying and not shocking at all.”

Wrote Gordon, “The mural depicts, among other scenes of daily life at the University of Virginia, a male faculty member standing on a porch and tossing a mostly naked student her bra as his beleaguered wife comes up the stairs.”

That panel is in an alcove also on the stairs, and Gordon says undergrads who pass it are bothered and she’s seen parents shaking their heads at the painting. Nor is she a fan of the scene of the male student duct-taped to a column at the Rotunda in which a presumably drunk girl is being dragged off.

“I don’t want that mural in a teaching space or in a student space,” says Gordon. Nor is it the UVA experience she wants her children to experience, she says.

A committee was formed to examine the mural in January 2015, and it submitted more than one recommendation to the university administration, according to UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn. A decision has not been made, he says.

The mural was commissioned in 1996, funded by a prominent group of donors. Perry worked on the piece for 16 years, and the final panels were unveiled in 2012, including the ones Gordon finds objectionable. “It would be different to me if it were in an art museum,” she says.

“Museums are teaching facilities,” says Richard Guy Wilson, who is chair of the university’s public art committee and a mural benefactor. Old Cabell Hall is a “preeminent art building” and Perry’s mural plays off the copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” there, he says.

“We will become the laughing stock of the country” if the mural is removed, he says.

Perry is “arguably the best mural painter in the country,” says Paul Barolsky, who teaches Italian Renaissance art and literature at UVA. “He’s a superb draftsman and storyteller and he painted an allegory of UVA.” The idea of removing the panel, says Barolsky, is “preposterous” and sets “a dangerous precedent.”

He asked his students to look at the mural. “They just shrugged their shoulders,” he says. “It’s not obvious. One thought it was streaking.”

He says, “If you start to cover up paintings that offend one person or another, where do you draw the line? Should I not teach Italian masters because of nude figures?”

Perry’s mural is a contemporary reinterpretation of the classical theme of the virtues and vices, which comes from a long tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle and which may make some people uncomfortable, explains Lyn Warren, who owns Les Yeux du Monde gallery and who sells Perry’s works.

The artist is not trying just to paint some salacious scene, she says, and he balances good and evil, conflict and harmony. “That’s why it stays interesting,” she says. The mural is full of references to philosophy, literature and art, recreated in the context of Jefferson’s university, she says.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says Warren. “After Monticello and the Lawn, it’s one of the most important art works in this area. It’s one of the university’s greatest treasures.”

History professor John Mason is a fan of the mural and particularly likes the way it “mashes through the gentility that is UVA.” He likes the bacchanalia scene because “UVA can be uptight. It’s a feast for the eyes.” And he likes the satire in the work.

However, like Gordon, he finds the panel with the “professor and young woman clearly interrupted in hanky-panky” inappropriate. Where once, in what he calls “the ‘Mad Men’ era,” a university professor may have considered attractive female students a “perk,” he says, now there’s no faster way for a faculty member to lose his job.

“We shouldn’t smirk at it any more,” he says. “If it came today, no one would allow that panel. Times change, sometimes very quickly.”

Mason says he doesn’t have an answer about what should be done. “I’m not saying it should be painted over,” he says. “Do you offer the painter a chance to redo it? Do you make it a teaching moment?”

That’s a debate that remains ongoing. And while Perry declined to comment for this article, in a 2005 interview conducted by his wife, Ann Beattie, he said, “I was glad if people brought their own interpretations to my work.”