Catching Up with Ntozake Shange
Her innovations in stage verse and movement have
inspired a new generation
By Will Power
What was it like to interview Ntozake Shange? For me, it felt like something coming full circle. What we in the hip-hop theatre and spoken word movements owe her is both enormous and obvious: Shange is one of the supreme pioneers of her generation in terms of presenting verse on stage; in terms of actors melding speech, song and movement to create character and story; in terms of performers using various extensions of their spirit to share an experience on stage. From our vantage point, she's the matriarch of the whole thing.
The great range of her accomplishments—as poet, playwright, actor, director, novelist and educator—was recognized over the past two months in celebrations of her work on both the East and West Coasts. In New York City, New Federal Theatre organized a monthlong retrospective of events and performances that included readings, panels and a revised version of Shange's 1980 piece about pre-urban-renewal African-American life, It Hasn’t Always Been This Way, directed and choreographed by Dianne McIntyre. In San Francisco, excerpts from her poetic novel Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter were combined with the writings of Indo-Mexican poet Jimmy Santiago Baca to form the text of A Place to Stand, a new "experiment in performative storytelling" (as director Sean San José described it) by Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts, with Shange's daughter Savannah leading the cast.
When I talked with Shange at New Federal's Lower Manhattan offices in late February, she had attended some of the New York events but had yet to see A Place to Stand. Shange suffered a stroke in 2004 at age 55, and it has slowed her speech as well as her ability to write. In the past two-and-a-half years, Shange says, she has been able to complete only three poems—a fragment of her former output. "I have to search for words sometimes," she cautioned at the outset of our interview. "You can include that I said that, because it's important that people know that my relationship to language is not the same that it's always been."
She was, nevertheless, more eloquent, more cogent, than I believe I could ever be. I had met Shange briefly at the National Black Theatre Festival in 1999, but my primary association with her had been through reading and seeing her plays and, not coincidentally, being mentored by a number of her contemporaries, artists who came of age with her in the early '70s in the Bay Area, where I was raised. The radio DJ and cultural activist Avotcja, a collaborator of Shange's, was a mentor of mine; so was Laurie Carlos, a cast member in for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (it was Carlos who convinced Penumbra Theatre Company of St. Paul, Minn., to commission my solo work Flow, before New York Theatre Workshop or others got involved). Aku Kadogo, who also appeared in for colored girls, recently hosted me as a visiting artist at Wayne State University, where she teaches, and her goddaughter Amber Efé played the DJ in my play The Seven. Paula Moss, who created for colored girls's choreography with Shange and accompanied the show from San Francisco to New York, is a cousin of mine.
The point of noting these connections is to say that I believe these artists understood the linkages between Shange's innovations for the stage and the kind of work we have more recently been developing in the hip-hop theatre movement. Speaking with Shange, I was fascinated not just by her reaffirmation of the theatrical use of verse, and of the Bay Area's formative influence on her work, but also by her entrepreneurial spirit; a lot of us in our generation have the same feeling—that we have to make it happen for ourselves. We began doing hip-hop theatre in night clubs, on street corners, in bars and poetry spots before we started moving into traditional theatres. Her story reminds me of all that.
Sitting with her face to face, I could feel Ntozake Shange's amazing spirit. "I'm still creating," she told me, and I knew that despite all obstacles she would continue to do that. Talking with her was a life-moving experience.
WILL POWER: I want to ask you about your one-act play It Hasn’t Always Been This Way. You said, "Black neighborhoods were not always ghettos. Nor were they always kingdoms for yuppies, either. My play examines that phenomenon." I'm fascinated by this because I'm from the Fillmore in San Francisco, and for me, growing up in the '70s and the '80s, the issue of ghetto and gentrification was always my context.
NTOZAKE SHANGE: It Hasn’t Always Been This Way is a choreopoem, actually, not a play. The bulk of it was written in 1980, and other poems have been added over the years. The piece is about how at one time we lived in neighborhoods—we didn't live in ghettos, and we didn't live in urban-renewal districts, and we didn't live around white people. Our neighborhoods were black and/or Latino. The neighborhoods were poor, and there weren't all that many alternatives to poverty. There wererats and roaches and the ceilings were peeling. Black people were trying to move out; German Jews were trying to move out; Arabs were trying to move out. It became worse when they brought the highways through, which divided the neighborhoods and took away our business districts—our black pharmacies and vegetable stands, the black shoemaker, the black dry cleaners. All the services you need to keep a community alive flew away from us. And then there was what they called "white flight" from the city, which made it worse—we were left there by ourselves, with fewer city services. It was after that that gentrification began.
That's when people began to want to come back into the cities.
They wanted to come back when they realized that the commute from the suburbs wasn't all it was cracked up to be. But in the play I don't explore what happened after white flight and gentrification.
I didn't realize this was a piece you'd been developing since 1980.
I left it alone for a long time. I was working with a band in the '90s, Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio, and I started adding pieces to it at that time. One of the additions was an update to reflect the brutality of the war in Iraq. The last addition was written in 2006, after I got sick. Dianne McIntyre's been working on it herself. I have no idea what all this will sound like, because I've never heard it all together. And I haven't seen any of the choreography to it performed since 1980. I danced in the original version.
I know you also spent time in Los Angeles, but you have said that the Bay Area arts scene of the '70s and '80s had a powerful effect on your work. How was it different from what you might have found in another city?
Well, as I remember it, the Bay Area was one of the few places in the country that was truly and actively multicultural. When I wrote for colored girls, I meant it for all women of color. When I took that idea to New York, they took out all my Puerto Ricans, and when I wanted to include Asians, they looked at me like I had lost my mind!
Why do you think there was pressure in New York to make it specifically an African-American female experience?
Because that's how Easterners perceived the world—in terms of black and white. You see, the history of the migration of black people to the North, and our integration (to the degree that we have any) into white society was very brash and abrasive. Other people from other places—until this recent immigration stuff started—weren't dealt with as aggressively as intruders as we were.
It seems to me that your original vision was ahead of its time. In my generation, with hip-hop theatre, inclusiveness is more of a natural thing—it can be blacks and Asians, particularly on the West Coast. That's a very Bay-Area–type perspective.
Yes. I belonged to a group there called the Third World Women's Collective, which was a highly skilled group of women writers and painters and sculptors. We published a book in four languages, with silk-screens and music scores in it—art by women of every ethnicity, from every place imaginable. I worked very hard at that time—I was in dance class five days a week, and I also gave readings at least once or twice a week. I studied dance till my seventh month of pregnancy, and I was 32 when I had my daughter. I was very dedicated.
When we did the first for colored girls in San Francisco, I was really lucky. I involved the women in my dance classes in my company. I had gone out one night and heard a band from Martinique, and I said to myself, "I don't have to put together a band! All I have to do is ask this band to work with us." And I found a jazz trio to work with the same way. I didn't have to worry about how to pay these people, because the deal was that we'd split everything absolutely even-steven—band, dancer, actor, poet, everybody. At that point in time, we were all so eager to perform that that seemed reasonable.
Today performers seem to categorize themselves, especially here in New York—I'm a dancer, I'm a singer. For your ensemble choreopoems, have you found it difficult to cast performers who can do it all—move, sing, recite poetry, play characters?
When I left California, I caught holy hell trying to get that same essence back. It was very difficult to find people as fluid as the people I was accustomed to working with.
You've said you're a poet first, a playwright second.
I still say that. It's very hard for me to write a storyline—I don't understand storylines. I understand language, or at least I used to. I can write. I can move. But I'm not interested in what happens—I'm interested in how it sounds. In order for a play to work, there has to be drama: You can't say what happens, you have to see it happen. But in narrative there isn't always drama. I can write really good scenes, but that doesn't mean anything happens.
Tell me about your adaptation of Mother Courage and Her Children at the Public Theater in 1980. What inspired you to adapt Brecht?
Joseph Papp asked me to do it. And Brecht had always been my favorite of all the German playwrights. I was very honored when I got the Obie for it. I did a lot of research. It's set after the Civil War, during the Indian Wars.
Did you explore Brecht's alienation technique as well—his idea that you're not supposed to be so emotionally involved in the play that you forget to think?
No. [Critic] Frank Rich wrote a whole page in the New York Times lambasting me for not having done that. When a black audience saw Mother Courage continue to go on, they stood up on their feet and clapped for her. Frank Rich didn't understand that for black people, survival is something to be heralded and championed. So it was an emotional, full-of-joy experience for us—which is not what Brecht wanted. They did a beautiful job last week here at New Federal with the play—S. Epatha Merkerson played Mother Courage, for one night only.
Why did Joe Papp ask you to adapt that play?
Joe was always coming up with things for me to do. He had great faith in me, and I must say he changed my career by inspiring me to do things I had never thought of doing. He let me fail and never withdrew his support. I used to call him my art-daddy. He was very kind to me, and fundamentally important in my development.
I don't know how much hip-hop theatre or spoken word performance you've seen, but a lot of us see you as the primary predecessor of this movement. Like Saul Williams, or Sarah Jones, or Def Poetry Jam.
I know Saul Williams's work, yes. Well, it's very gratifying. It's a humbling experience to think that I influenced young people or had an impact on them, because all I was trying to do was my work. When I see that, sometimes it makes me feel like crying. Oh, my God, people really did listen! I didn't know it would affect people that way!
[Hip hop artists] are so funny and witty; some of them are absolutely brilliant. They play with language and with people's sense of themselves, and challenge people about who they are. I like that. And they're very technologically aware, which is very impressive to me. I'm just prehistoric on a computer.
How did A Place to Stand come about at Intersection for the Arts?
I used to work at Intersection when I lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. Jessica Hagedorn and Thulani Davis and I all worked there. We were members of the Bay Area Poets Coalition. So a couple of years ago it was the 40th anniversary of Intersection—it happened to be just after I had become ill and moved to California to be closer to my daughter. I found out that Campo Santo, which is their resident theatre company, was doing workshops that could last two or three years on somebody's whole body of work. They were working on Jimmy Santiago Baca's work, which I love very much. I asked Sean San José if I could be an artist in residence at Intersection, and he said they'd love to have me. So I made all these plans that ultimately I didn't have the energy or the intellectual capacity to carry out. So what happened is that without my knowledge, my daughter, who's an actress—her name is Savannah Shange—joined Campo Santo and they started creating a piece using my body of work. They did a mescal, a mix, of my work and Jimmy's work, which I haven't seen and have had nothing to do with. I know my novel Liliane is part of it, because my daughter is playing the role. I'm looking forward to seeing the show because I'm going to be as surprised as anybody else.
This flurry of interest in your work must be exciting.
It's amazing—it dumfounds me. Young women come up to tell me, "I was Lady in Purple [in for colored girls]," or "I was Lady in Whatever-Color-It-Was," and I'm standing there trying to remember what the colors did, what poems they had! It's quite extraordinary. But now, I'm so enamored of Liliane, the last novel I wrote, that I might stay with that form from here on. It's so sensual—I could feel it this past week when I heard it. It made me feel like melting. I couldn't believe that I had actually accomplished that. I felt that if I never did anything else, that's it. Yeah, that was it.
Will Power's plays include The Seven, Flow and The Gathering.