50 Years of Civil Rights Leadership: Performances by the School of Music, Theatre and Dance

>> Aaron Dworkin: My name is Aaron Dworkin, I serve as Dean of the School of Music, Theater, and Dance here at the University of Michigan.

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First, I would just like to share our appreciation again to Reverend Jackson for joining us as we celebrate your legacy and commitment to civil rights for more than 50 years. Thank you again!

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As we get set up here, I just wanted to share, when Dean Collins shared with me her desire, that the performing arts and its role in the Civil Rights Movement serve as an important part of this symposium, I was moved and filled with excitement for the opportunity that our students would have to demonstrate some of the ways in which the arts can help us shape a better society. The reality is that the arts have played a pivotal role in social justice movements from the very beginning. Frederick Douglass, the great orator, statesman, freedom fighter, leading the abolitionist movement, played the violin, as well as his son and his grandson, Joseph Douglass, was the first black violinist to tour nationally and internationally. Frederick Douglass believed all fully-emancipated, civilized men should understand music. To that end, he taught himself to play the violin, which served an important role in his life and which is why you will find his violin atop his desk at the Frederick Douglass museum in D.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others in the Civil Rights Movement, grew up with a piano and the performing arts in their homes. Martin and Coretta met at a music school, where she was studying voice and violin. Dr. King shared at a speech he gave in 1964, in Berlin, long before the modern SAS and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down, for in the particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. For over 50 years, Reverend Jackson has been at the forefront of these issues. Of the great Mahalia Jackson, you stated, that's where the power comes from, when there is no gap between what you say and who you are, what you say and what you believe, when you can express that in song, it is all the more powerful. It is now my honor to welcome to the stage, a number of our talented SMTD students and faculty who will depict the values and ignite the emotions of the Civil Rights Movement through song, dance, drama, and instrumental music. Each artist and performance will be individually introduced by Justin Gordon, who is an LSNA student, minoring in global theater and ethnic studies. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Gordon to the stage.

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>> Justin Gordon: Good afternoon! Good afternoon, everybody! Good afternoon, good afternoon! I am humbled and grateful to be here, and I'd like to speak on behalf of all of my family in the room, personally to Reverend Jackson, and say that, after your remarks today and your presence here on campus, I'll respect in reverence for you and your legacy has deepened even more, and I just want to give a humbled thank you to begin this - this serenade of music and performance for you. And he, his message, has inspired us to be able to say all around the world, together, we all going to say it together. I am...

>> Audience: I am...

>> Justin Gordon: ...somebody!

>> Audience: ...somebody!

>> Justin Gordon: I said, I am...

>> Audience: I am...

>> Justin Gordon: ...somebody!

>> Audience: Somebody!

>> Justin Gordon: Thank you, Reverend Jackson. I appreciate you. I'd like to first introduce Mr. Jordan Samuels, he is a musical theater student, and a baritone vocalist, and his accompaniment will be from Professor Jason [inaudible]. He will be signing the song, Make Them Hear You, from the musical Ragtime. The original singer and performer of this song is Brian Stokes Mitchell, and in the musical, it was -- the song was sung by the protagonist named, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., and he was a successful black pianist who started a riot and revoked after his wife was shot down by murderous policemen, only after trying to shake the hand of then President, Theodore Roosevelt. Ladies and gentlemen, please, Mr. Samuels. [Applause]

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>> Justin Gordon: One more time for Mr. Jordan Samuels, please!

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Now, some people sing songs, that man just sang that song [laughter] right there. Next, I'd like to present to you an excerpt from the documentary, Love, Life, and Loss, which featured the song, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, originally composed by Joel Thompson, and will be performed by the University of Michigan men's glee club. Under the direction of Mr. Eugene Rogers, Associate Chair of Choirs and the Professor of Conducting here at our esteemed university. Please, enjoy!

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>> Eugene Rogers: Great art should do more than entertain. Great art should connect you to things that are going on today.

>> Joel Thompson: I wanted to process my own feelings about being a young, black man in this very racially-tense time, and also to - to do something about it. I remember making a very purposeful decision, like, I need to say something with this art, I need to provide healing with this art.

>> Eugene Rogers: So The Seven Last Words is a multi-movement work that features the last words of African American men who've lost their lives before their time.

>> Daniel Passino: Music is a good outlet to really tell a story, and I think that's what we're doing here with this pieces. We're really telling a story, and to have the perspective of the people that were lost.

>> Joel Thompson: The Michigan Men's Glee Club is one of the oldest choral organizations in the United States.

>> Eugene Rogers: The Seven Last Words is a good fit for the glee club because of how diverse the choir is. Having people of various races singing the words of this struggle is very meaningful to me and very moving to me, to see people connecting with the pain.

>> Patrick Kiessling: This piece purposefully is very shocking, and it is meant to inspire a reaction.

>> Unknown Speaker: I don't think great art should always make us feel comfortable.

>> Wesley Fields: It's easy to get wrapped up in anger, but I feel a lot more needs to be focused on honoring their lives.

>> Unknown Speaker: Now, more than ever, do we need art to create sincere dialogue between disparate groups.

>> Patrick Kiessling: That's the point of really, truly great art, is we're trying to inspire that conversation.

>> Daniel Passino: It's not about a color of your skin, it's not about the type of person you are, it's really about - it's really about life.

>> Ryan Carrell: It doesn't matter what the nature of the loss is, because it is tragic no matter who it happens to.

>> Unknown Speaker: As we focus on Love, Life, and Loss, regardless of one's political opinion, we can all agree on the value of human life.

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>> Justin Gordon: That was very moving. And I'd like to now, with my personal pleasures, bring to the stage a super soprano vocalist, Miss Kayla Hill [phonetic]. She'll be accompanied today by Mr. Joshua [inaudible], and she'll be singing a song called, Minstrel Man, by Margaret Bonds, which is one song in a set of three called, The Three Dream Portraits. These set of songs, who are accompanied with text from poems of the late, the great Langston Hughes. This song, in particular, personifies a mindset of a minstrel performer while always having to continuously have a joyous exterior which struggling and wrestling with inner turmoil that structural racism always brings. Please, welcome Miss Kayla Hill to the stage.

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Is anyone else just absolutely floored by that performance? [Applause & cheering] Man, oh my. I'm from the west side of Detroit, Michigan, and we don't get a lot of opera singing. The first time I ever heard anyone personally sing opera was three weeks ago during their practice [laughter], and my whole perception during singing has changed ever since I heard Miss Hill's voice! One more time for Miss Hill!

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This next program, and the leader of this program, deals with certain demographic that we forget about. A certain demographic that sometimes does not get the resources that they were entitled to as citizens, and they were taken away, technically, by the 13th Amendment. I'm speaking to the institute of prisons and the prison industrial complex, and the Prison Creative Arts Project, who was fighting against those inhumane practices that are happening behind those walls to our brothers and sisters. The Prison Creative Arts Project, which you'll see here in a film presentation, and subsequent after the - the film presentation, the director herself will come and give a scene of her play, Doing Time Behind the Visiting Glass. I'll allow you to learn and see what fighting for lives really looks like when you can't physically touch someone. Thank you.

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>> Ashley Lucas: My students and I are here for a theater exchange program with [inaudible], which is the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. We are a program at the University of Michigan called the Prison Creative Arts Project, or PCAP, and we do theater work in prisons with adults and children throughout the state of Michigan. Here in Rio, we have collaborators who do incredible theater for social change work in hospitals, prisons, and [inaudible].

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In Brazil, theater is of the people, for the people. This is a very Latin American tradition, it doesn't just belong to Brazil. But when my students come here, they realize that theater can happen in many different ways that they had not previously imagined, and the theater has many different practical roles in people's lives. Really high-quality, professional theater can happen in a cramped waiting room of the hospital where the actors have this much room to do a whole play, and it can be marvelous!

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My brother's an artist. He draws and paints, but mostly, he does graffiti. Right now, he's doing seven years for graffiti! [Foreign language], seven years of your life for a crime where nobody got hurt? Who's it helping for him to be in prison? The guy who's wall he wrote on? Shoot. Would have helped that guy more if they gave him community service and made him clean up the [inaudible] wall. I think, mostly, they locked him up because he's a smartass. So, when we was kids, we took this trip to El Paso, and we saw this mural that said, God is Mexican [laughing]. And, Danny, my brother, loved that! When we got back to Phoenix, he started going everywhere, writing it on all the walls. God is a...

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God comes from [foreign word]. God hangs out at [foreign word]. He didn't just paint the words, he made them beautiful. We grew up having this real strange relationship with God, because of my mother. So, we were Catholic and we went to church on Sundays and prayed like everybody else, but during the rest of the week, [inaudible] would talk to God like he was her compadre or something, like he was right there washing the dishes and folding the laundry, and then she'd get mad at God and call him stupid and yell at him, and then she'd have to apologize, because he's God, right? So she'd say something like, [foreign language], I was angry with you this morning for sending rain on the day of Lolita's first communion! But then I realized that you send the bad weather on purpose. So that it would blow [foreign language], ugly dress over her head on the steps of the church to punish her for being one of [foreign language] [laughter]. Now that your plan has been revealed to me, I want to say how sorry I am for yelling at you this morning, and for eating that extra communion wafer.

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So this was my mother! Right? We heard this all day long! And then my brother...well, he'd been hanging out with all these guys, right? And one night, a bunch of those guys got arrested. And if Danny [phonetic] had been with them, he would have got picked up too. So, so he started going to all of those place where he used to write, God is an undocumented immigrant, and God dances [foreign word]. And he started writing his friend's names instead. [Inaudible] is in prison. [Inaudible] is in prison. [Inaudible] is in prison. [Pause] The day the cops got him, he was writing, Leo [inaudible] is in prison. God is with him. God is a prisoner. [Crying] He tried to run when he saw the cops, but they caught him, and three of them beat him until he had a concussion. And they broke his right hand. So he don't write to so good no more. And after that, [inaudible] stopped talking to God for a week, and...and now Danny [phonetic], he writes us letters in this - this real shaky handwriting, and at the bottom, underneath his signature, he always writes, God is a prisoner.

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>> Justin Gordon: I am honored to say that Dr. Ashley Lucas is my mentor and, arguably, the greatest human being I personally know. And if you don't know who she is, as the late, great, temporary poet, Christopher Wallace, AKA Biggie Smalls, said, if you don't know, now you know, students.

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Next, I'd like to present an excerpt from a moving dance piece called, City of Rain, created by Camille A. Brown and performed by U of M dance majors and masters of fine arts candidates. This film, moving dance piece, represents the spirit of perseverance in the face of struggle, loss, and grief. Please, enjoy!

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If I could dance like that, I wouldn't be up here talking to you all right now. I'd just move for a living. That was - that was amazing. That was amazing. Now, we're almost at our conclusion, and we have had some triumph, we have had some encouraging words, we've got to end with some jazz, right? We've got to end with some music, correct? Yes! [Applause] Yes. I am proud to present a jazz quartet for the ages. We have [inaudible] Belgrave [phonetic] on saxophone, [inaudible] Reed [phonetic] on drums, [inaudible] on bass, and David [inaudible] on trumpet. They will be playing, Wail, a song by Bud Powell. He was a great jazz pianist back in the 40's and 50's that battled police brutality and racism, despite making classic music. Afterwards, they'll play a song called, Cyclic Episode. Now, as all good parties go and all good celebrations go, we got to give you something to leave with, something to go home with. We've got to send Reverend Jesse Jackson home on a good note, on a great note, even as he walks outside of the door, correct? [Cheering] Alright! We have one of our esteemed professors and musicians, Tiffany Ing [phonetic], will be playing on the Carillon out in the Bell Tower, she will be playing Negro Spirituals as leave, as you walk to your cars, or buses, songs such as, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and the Black National Anthem, lift every voice and sing. Ladies and gentlemen, that is my time, I love you all, family, hope to see you soon. Thank you!

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