George Bass lecture, "Folk Traditions: Forms, Images, and Ideas for Black Dramas," at the University of Iowa, June 8, 1973

Speaker 1: The following is an address from the Fifth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, recorded at the University of Iowa, June 9th, 1973. The topic for the Institute was The Afro-American on Stage and Film. Folk Traditions, Images and Ideas for Black Drama is the subject of this address by George Bass, a lecturer in the English Department at Brown University. Introducing Mr. Bass is Darwin Turner, Director of the Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Bass first several years ago when I was in New York trying rather desperately to find people who were connected in drama who could tell me something about what was going on. I was put in contact with Lindsay Patterson, Lindsay Patterson got me in touch with George Bass who at that time had just finished his... Had been working most recently as the secretary of Langston Hughes. Darwin Turner: He was knowledgeable in the theater of New York, and had already begun to demonstrate his talent as a playwright. He received his bachelors from Fisk University, a master of arts in the Film School from New York University. He served as a scriptwriter for Voices in New York City, as an artistic director for the Reese Amphitheater in New York City, as a teacher/director at several institutions, an artistic director for summer theater in New Haven, Connecticut. He's been an associate producer and director for On Being Black, a series of original teleplays on television in Boston. An associate director an playwright in residence for the Urban Arts Corps in New York City. Darwin Turner: These various activities in direction and in playwriting have led to awards. In 1964 he received the American Society of Cinematologists Rosenthal Award for the most creative film script by a young American writer. He's received a John Golden Fellowship for Playwriting at Yale University and The Game, as I think you recall from the advance announcements, The Game, a screen adaptation of an original stage play by Bass won the Plaque of the Lion of St. Mark Award at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. Darwin Turner: Presently he is a lecturer in the English department at Brown University and the director of Rites and Reason, a university community cultural arts project. He'll talk to us this morning on Folk Traditions, Forms, Images and Ideas for Black Theater. Mr. Bass. George Bass: Good morning to those I haven't greeted already. Just a few days ago I was in Nashville attending funeral services for Arna Bontemps. Arna Bontemps was the last of the renaissance poets and writers to leave us. So this morning, remembering the legacy that Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher and many other fine Black artists left us, made us heir to. I would like to make my presentation in their memory, in thanksgiving for the beautiful, wonderful legacy they gave us, in celebration of the roots and the strength from which we create. George Bass: So just reaching out to commune with them, I'm going to ask you to touch each other, touch hands, okay? And those of you who remember it, Val you, and everybody else. Let's just say, I've known rivers. Audience: I've known rivers. George Bass: I've known rivers. All: "I've known rivers as ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo, and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." George Bass: And from the depth of my soul, I will share with you this morning the things that I have learned, the things that I have discovered as an artist, as a man, living within this space and this time. George Bass: In the beginning when the world mas made, man lived in the most beautiful glade, and he didn't pay rent not one red cent because went and had that awful accident. Man slipped and fell, his head began to swell, God gave him holy hell, man said, "Oh well, I guess I'm just a natural heather, so I'm going to head up and move out of this garden Eden," which he did do, without a single clue as to what would be his fate beyond that garden gate. George Bass: Well, beyond that garden gate things weren't too stable. Beyond that garden gate Cain killed Abel. Beyond that garden gate greed gave birth to war. Beyond that garden gate living became a chore. And Eve's fig leaf became a funeral wreath hanging over the doorway to joy and grief. In the beginning there was nothing. Most absolutely, positively nothing except God and space. Then God developed a taste for apricots. "Let there be apricots," said God. Two juicy golden apricots, and so God ate his apricots and God loved his apricots. God enjoyed his apricots. He enjoyed them so much until he decided to make an apricot tree. George Bass: God enjoyed his apricots and loved his apricots and ate his apricots, and loved them so much he decided he wanted someone with whom he could share his apricots, so God created a worm. And the worm loved God's apricots, and the worm ate God's apricots, and ate God's apricots, and ate God's apricots, and loved them so much until he moved inside the apricots. And he ate and ate and got fat and long, and long and fat, and long and fat until he was too long and fat to live inside the apricots so he moved outside and renamed himself snake. George Bass: God and that snake eating apricots. And, "You are eating too many of my apricots," said God. "Your apricots?" Said the snake. "Yes, my apricots." "But I thought you said share and share alike." "I did say share and share alike." "Word of honor?" "Word of honor." "Forever?" "Forever." "Amen," said the snake, then up popped Adam, and he started eating God's apricots too. George Bass: Now God was getting vexed, so he said, "Whoa man, whoa man, whoa man," then up popped Eve, and she started eating God's apricots too. "All right," said God, "all right, you can have my apricot tree. I'm going off and create a apple tree for me, and not one of you had dare touch it." "All right by me," said the snake as he winked at Eve. "All right by me," said Eve. "All right by me," said Eve. So God went off and created his apple tree. "Hey wait a minute," said Adam. "Hey, you didn't ask me, I didn't have anything to say about that." "Don't worry," said the snake, "he's just bluffing. He's just bluffing." "I'll be damned," said God. "I'll be God damned." George Bass: In the beginning there was darkness. In the darkness was a bird, a yard bird. A backyard bird, a Black backyard bird. And the yard bird was called Yard Bird. The yard bird flapped its wings and laid an egg. The yard bird pecked at the egg trying to understand that which it had created. The egg broke open. Out of the eggs came suns, moons, planets, stars, and people. The planets and stars began spinning and created a universe of infinite space. The suns and moons began spinning and created seasons and day. Day began dawning and created a cycle of light called night and day. The seasons began turning and created a rhythm called nature. Nature started moving and sent things to coming and going, coming and going. George Bass: The coming and going got back to Yard Bird, got good to Yard Bird. Yard Bird started singing. The songs made waves that soared through the infinite space. Infinite space was turned on by the sounds of Yard Bird's songs, and set new charges in motion. The motion of the new charges had the force of change, and the force of the change was sight. Thus, from the flapping of a yard bird's wings, men who existed in darkness came to see, and to know that which they saw. Time passed. Time passes. The question remains, what will we do with our sight? George Bass: Okay, those are three little stories that I wrote for various plays of mine. Now those three stories are reactions to the creation, right? The creation of world, creation of things. Now in the first instance, it was taking something that was given to me, the Genesis story, and reacting, or retelling that rather. Through my own experiences, the way I wanted to tell it, but it was a story that we all know. In the beginning, right? George Bass: Then in the second instance I used that story as a reference, but I bent it a little bit. I made it into a lie. I followed that Black folks edition of lying, but it was a wonderful lie, and we enjoyed the lie, didn't we? Okay. In the third instance I created something totally new, something original. Something out of our history, right? I talked about Yard Bird and talked about people living in darkness, talked about people creating music, and using that music to sustain them, okay? George Bass: Now that's the way Black folk have reacted to their experience in this new world. We have taken things they gave us and changed them to say them the way we wanted to say them. We have taken things that were given us and bent them a little bit, and had fun bending them. In fact sometimes we had to have fun bending them, because they had to be bent anyhow. Or they were given to us bent. But anyway, and then in the third instance we create things. Out of our profound, divine, creative genius. George Bass: Now one of the primary assumptions influencing my work as a playwright and director is that my task as a theater artist is to create specific experiences out of our collective experiences that will enunciate images, myth and metaphors to help us gain a deep, spiritual recognition of ourselves as a community. I think one way we might begin the rebuilding of our community is by defining the myths and mysteries of our births, pleasures, sufferings, strivings, and deaths. George Bass: We must redefine our past. We must reassess our present, and we must find alternatives for our future. The vehicle I have chosen to realize my work as a theater artist is the establishment and development of a theater of myth and history. A theater which will deal with our myth, our history, interpreted from our point of view towards the specific end of celebrating and affirming and articulating our own humanity. George Bass: Okay, now just as the classical ballet, the grand opera, the symphonies and the sonatas of Europe are not expressions of our folk experience, so the modality of Western theater forms is alien to our cultural rhythms and lifestyles. Just as our music forms and our dance forms are accurate and profound expressions of our humanity, I believe strongly that we might be successful in creating dramatic forms which will allow us to accurately articulate and interpret the realities of Black characters and Black experiences. George Bass: Now when I was at Yale they taught me well in the Western traditions, okay? But I knew there that those forms did not allow me to express who and what I knew and understood about my experience and the experiences of my people and my ancestors. All right, so then using a kind of quasi-scientific approach they interfered to the dramatic form, because my undergraduate work was in the sciences, in mathematics principally. And then I used those references and that understanding of investigation to begin my work. George Bass: So what I did was to investigate and see what are the constants that exist if any in the two peaks of Western dramatic form? Say fifth century Greece and the 15th, 16th century Europe. And when I started investigating I found a lot of constants, a lot of constants. Now the two principal constants that impressed me is that the forms had grown out of and developed out of sacred rites, the Dionysian rites of Greece, the liturgical drama of medieval Europe, okay? George Bass: Now I said, "Gee, if theater is a religious kind of experience that serves the spiritual needs of people, of a community, what the hell are we doing creating in those models?" That's not the way we worship. So then I looked and I said, "Gee, we worship this way, this way, this way," which we all know. Then I said, "But hey, wait a minute. All of us don't go to church." What about those of us that don't go to church? So then I said, "Well, we go to cabarets, we go to bars," okay. Now between the church and the bar I got most colored folk. George Bass: So I decided that I would then look at those, so I found a lot of constants, right? I found a lot of constants. I found out they were the same place. The music is the same. Carlton was telling me yesterday, "They say Jesus in one place and baby in the other." They preach in one, and testify in one. They lie, and they signify in the other. Right? They should in one and they dance in the other. The organic interaction between the performers, be they the choir and the preacher or the musicians or entertainers, that organic interaction is happening. People are talking to each other. People are communicating, right? George Bass: Okay I said, "Well gee, if that's the same then what do I use?" What do I use since I can't use those religious rites necessarily. What do I use? Then I said, "Well gee, let's look now back at who I am and where I came from, and what do I have?" And in looking at that, I realized that there are two uninterrupted folk traditions that we have here in the New World, and they are music and dance, okay? People don't know it, but most of these dances that we've been doing, the Boogaloo, the Charleston, I mean, you name them, go over to Africa. Pearl Primus did it, Katherine Dunham did it. George Bass: The Stearns, I forget their names, but the wrote a book. Two Stearns, a man and wife, they wrote a book on the history of jazz dances. They did it, a lot of people have gone over and done it, and they have photographed ancient sacred dances in West Africa that beat for beat, step for step, what we do over here and say we created something. Racial memory, it's profound, it's profound. So profound that it reminds me here of a statement that I read in a slave narrative. Fisk University did a collection, The Unwritten History of Slavery or something, and in that one woman says, "I'm as old as God, for he had me in mind from the very beginning." George Bass: Now that's deep, right? That's deep like those rivers, okay? Now the depth of that river somehow transcends time, space, and reaches through, and it expresses itself in this time, in this place. And we do the Watusi, right? Okay, okay. Now, but we also have, we are creating new things, and we're doing all kind of fantastic things, so I said, "Okay, the thing that we have that really profoundly expresses and articulates who we are is our music." Okay, now what is that music? What are the dominant chords of that sound? George Bass: Okay, we have the spirituals. We have the blues, and we have jazz. And they just about cover everything that we might create in terms of sound. So I decided that, "Gee, what I need to create are mythic modes." Mythic modes, and the mythic modes that I decided that I wanted to create was a blues mode, a spiritual mode and a jazz mode. And I wanted them to deal specifically with different aspects of our worldview and our life view and the way we function in enduring and surviving. George Bass: And I looked at the spiritual and I said, "Gee, these are about that time when we were involved with flight, when we were running away from slavery, when we were running away from ourselves, when we were running away from Earth, when we were running away..." We were just running. Right? Invisible man. They were keeping that nigger running, so he started creating spirituals. And in them we have noble aspirations then affirmed and divine. George Bass: And then in the form we have community. (singing) ♪ In the Lord, in the Lord [inaudible] ♪♪ People, the leader and the group, and it's essential to the form, and that form was going, and that form was going. And that was what was happening to the people, even to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Still the spiritual form, the mythic mode of the spiritual. The leader and the follower, singing and marching with that sword in their hand. Remember. So we have the spiritual, boom. George Bass: Then we have the blues. The blues, isolation, separation, alienation, loneliness. The individual, the individual without roots, the individual with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The blues, all of those wonderful blues lyrics that we created, that express need, human frustration. Cold, lonely. It's a definition of earthy desires. Naked, brutal, cold, searching, seeking, but alone. Alone, it's the individual, the individual. Okay, and we all know about that. I don't need to deal with that any more. George Bass: And finally we have the jazz form, the mythic mode of the jazz form, okay? Now in the jazz form we become extremely intellectual, okay? There are many paradoxes because it's psychological, okay? So that what we have finally in those three forms is soul, body, and mind. Soul, body and mind. Okay, what else does a man have? Soul, body and mind. And that's what I am trying to deal with. The soul of man, the body of man, the mind of man, articulating, enunciating, images, myths, metaphors that would clarify all of that, so we can find intelligent alternatives. So that we can reshape the world order. That's what it's about. Okay? George Bass: Now I said, "Damn, you've put a whole lot on yourself. How do you think you're going to do that? I mean, who are you?" And then I started thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, and all of those great men, and my mama and your mama and our daddies, and church. And I said, well I'm a Black man who's searching, who's seeking for answers, and who believes in his ancestry and the divine intelligence of life, and will use those to articulate some of these things that we need to know. George Bass: Okay, so then what I did is I went to folk traditions, and I said okay, what are folk traditions? Being very specific. How do we express those traditions? We have music, we have language, and then we have experiential forms. The church, dancing, the barbershop, the beauty parlor, the corner. The different ways that we get together as people to communicate, to interact. Because going back to my initial premise, it's about building community. It's about reshaping a new order, okay. So then I continued defined in the ways and problems I must deal with. George Bass: And so I said, well gee. Most essential to Black people is improvisation, a love of freedom, okay? We love freedom. Now we're artists so we discipline everything, and we create within dark lines, but we're free within those lines, and we do fantastic things within that form. But we are free, we move, and incidentally I believe that freedom can only exist within limits anyhow. If you tell me to create something I say, "Create what?" You say, "Something." "Something what?" "Something." Well what's something? Where do I begin? You have got to tell me. You want me to create something, and if you start defining limits, then I'm free to begin to create. George Bass: You say, "Oh, I want you to create me a fruit." "All right." "I want you to create me a fruit that is juicy and golden." "Okay." "I want you to create me a fruit that grows on trees. I want you..." And then as you define limits, as you define limits I can be more creative, and then I'll create an apricot, why not? Okay. So those limits are important, and we use them. The jazz musicians use them. The poets use them. The actors use them. We all use them. George Bass: Okay, but it must be there. That love of freedom must be there. I mean, look at the way we wear our clothes. I was talking yesterday about that grace and style, with Carlton. We were talking about that grace and style. It's that love of freedom, and it informs everything we create. Everything we create. It's informed by that love of freedom. So if people ask you, "What is soul?" You tell them, "Soul is a profound understanding of freedom that informs the way we create." That's what soul is, okay? George Bass: Now, then I found out that in most of our experiences there is that organic interaction between people, between things, okay, which we've talked about. Then finally I found out that within most of our experiences we have rhythm, that's the most important thing to us. Folks said, "Black folk got rhythm," and they didn't lie. And we shouldn't get uptight when you hear it, because we have. We have Black skin. We don't get uptight when people say, "Black folk got Black skin." We don't get uptight when they said, "Black folk got big nose, Black folk got thick lips." So why do we get upset when they said, "Black folk got rhythm." We have. If you got it, flaunt it. Okay. George Bass: Now okay, so we have rhythm, and we use rhyme, and we use ritual, and we use repetition. And so those are things that I have to investigate as an artist. How can I use these things to structure new dramatic forms that will give me the freedom to accurately articulate what I know and understand about being a Black man in the 20th century. Okay, because that's all the I'm talking about. That's all I'm talking about. I'm singing about my humanity and our humanity as a community. George Bass: Okay, now. I first wanted to deal with rhythm and improvisation because those things were very important, very important. And the first thing I wrote after I gained this kind of insight was the play Games. Now Games, as you saw yesterday, is an adaptation of a long version of Games, which was structured this way. Now that's the only time it's ever been performed the way you saw it. Every time it's performed it's performed differently, because here's what I did. I divided the piece into 12 beats. 12 is an important number to us because there are 12 bars to blues, so I used 12 frequently. So I defined 12 signposts, and they were signposts like this. George Bass: I created two characters. I created a Game, which you saw, and a Victim. In the play version, the Victim is a woman. In the film, the filmmaker chose for some reason, and she didn't consult me, but that's all right. She chose to make the Victim a man. Okay, now I do things like signpost one. The Game enters, playing individual games, seemingly aloof, but establishing their sense of group. Okay? And then they're followed. George Bass: (singing) ♪ I spy [inaudible] snatch a victim from the sky. Fly to the East, fly to the West, trap the victim in his nest. [inaudible]. All behind my bases spy, all in the house spy. Here I come with eyes wide open, ready or not to shove [inaudible]. I spy [inaudible 00:31.43] 1, 2, 3, 4, Johnny. Home free, home free. 1, 2, 3, 4, [cootie]. I caught you. 1, 2, 3. Home free, home free. [inaudible]. ♪♪ George Bass: Now that's not what you heard yesterday, I'm sorry to say. Okay? And that film depresses me every time I see it, because it's not me up there on the stage. It's not me on that screen. But no matter. That's that, and this is this, okay. Now what I was dealing with was rhythm, jazz sounds, but improvisation. Now I discovered that people weren't ready for that, because most people were disjointed and disjointed because they didn't know what I was doing, as evidenced by that film, right? They didn't understand what I was really doing. Because what I defined as a story was we define ourselves and enlarge our sense of selves by destroying and defeating others. I was talking about the game of war. Okay? George Bass: Now that was buried, because at the end of the film she changed the thing. In the play, what happens at the end of the play is that the Victim comes back and they surround the Victim. It doesn't pass. This role of Victim, I'm the Victim in this society, and I ain't seeing nobody is coming and taking this. It's me, okay? So it doesn't shift, it doesn't change, I'm the victim, and I don't come up and look at you and pass, pass on the cross. Okay, so what happens is they move around the Victim, they join hands and they do. He's burning, he can't get out. George Bass: But what happens that didn't happen in the film is that the people become very uptight. As a group they become uptight about this whole thing of can't get out, and they're saying, "You can't get out, you can't get out." And they become paranoid about each other and, "You can't get out, you can't get out, you can't get out, you can't get out." And they're running off from each other, "You can't get out." Victim is locked in, and the person who is the hunter, who is attacking is locked in. You're both victims. Slave, master, both victims. Different roles, but both victims, and we have to understand that, victims. Okay? In this society we define our own importance by diminishing somebody else's importance. "He ain't shit." But what are you? George Bass: In Black Masque I stole something I heard on the street one day. I was walking down the street and I saw this Black man, and he was drunk and he said, "What you think my name is? What you think my name is? You think my name is shit?" Okay, now I took that, and this is talking about language. I'm going to jump about some, because I know basically what I'm doing, but I'm going to improvise because I'm really not talking about the problems that I had to tackle in developing and coming to this structure of the mythic modes that we're talking about. So follow me. If I jump, jump with me, okay? George Bass: Now in language, there's a sequence where Darky... Benny was Darky when we did it. Where Darky goes over to Hannah. This is a story, a play, Black Masque. Now Black Masque is a play about a woman who was pregnant for 350 years. She was pregnant for 350 years and the reason why she was pregnant for so long, she would sing this song. "The child in my belly is long overdue." And it became longer and longer, and eventually she said, "350 years overdue. He knows they hanged his daddy and they plans to hang him too." He refuses to be born. He says, "Mama, I ain't coming out of here until you clean up out there. I ain't coming out of here." Okay? So Mama had to clean up, and Mama had to work with all of these Black folk who were lying against her and mistreating her carrying her when they were co-opting with the man. George Bass: But she finally got over. Now in that process of trying to destroy them, because there was a sound that went through the whole of it. Do it for me, lets do it. George Bass: (humming) George Bass: Now you see, that sound went all the way through that play, and that sound, and that white man kept hearing that sound, and he kept saying, "Stop that, stop that, stop that. It's driving me crazy." And finally he asks this woman, "What is that sound?" She said, "You can't stop that. That's the sound of a people here inside my womb. You can't stop that sound. You can't stop that sound." Okay. Now in his effort to stop that sound he used to give Darky different things to give this woman, and among the things he gave him drugs, heroin, right? And Darky goes over trying to give this woman, and she won't take it. George Bass: And so he shoots up himself, and he gets high, and he's standing there and he's feeling good. And then he says to herself, "What..." Let me find it, I want to make it right. He says... It's before here. He says, "What's my name?" I can't find it here. He says, "What's my name, what's my name? You think my name's Shit? My name's Shit? My name's Shit?" Okay, and he's standing there with the needle, and a man goes up to him and says, "Don't just stand there, Shit. Share the shit." It's playing with language, and playing with the language that I got from the street. And then the go on and say, "Wow, this is some good shit, whoo." It's going on, playing with language, all sense of language and how do you use it? How do you use it? George Bass: The way some of those Greeks used to use it, how they'd play, do those things with language? We can do the same way. Okay, but then our way. Okay. So that was language. Now I was talking about really rhythm and improvisations, and the problem that I have to deal with in that. Now the first problem that I discovered is that people did not really understand what I was trying to do, so that's how I became a director, because I started directing so that then my things didn't get messed up, okay. So in order to resolve that problem of Games I just wrote a short version in which it just defines simply, in the traditional way, but still giving people room to create within the form, so that it is clear now. You can see the short version, I think it's in [Lindsay's] book. One of his books, at any rate. It's somewhere, and if not, ask me and I can get it for you. George Bass: Then the next thing that I wanted to deal with with improvisation was sound. The drum is important. Okay, now we did a play at Brown of El-Hajj Malik, okay? Now we read El-Hajj Malik and I said, "This is beautiful, but it ain't saying nothing." It's repeating what I read in the Autobiography of Malcolm X. And I don't want to invite people to the theater to see me be redundant. I want to say something to them that they will not have heard and experienced unless they came to share these moments with me and with us, our community of actors. So we said, "What we need to do now is to create a urban voodoo ritual," right? Because that's going back to our cultural forms, cultural models, which is what I'm talking about, using our cultural traditions as references. George Bass: So we used a voodoo ritual and we said, "What we are going to do is we are going to conjure up the spirit of El-Hajj Malik, and ask it to become our midnight sun to guide us out of this darkness." And that became the thing. Now we began it with saying that, the actors were in the back of the house. I'm director now, I'm not writing. I put the actors in the back of the house and I said, "Okay, you're in the holds of slave ships. You're in prisons. You are in little tight cubicles called rooms in Harlem. You are in all these crowded, cramped places, spiritually and physically, and what you've got to do is you've got to use whatever spiritual strength you have to conjure up Malcolm, and the only thing you got is the drum. That's all you can remember is the drum." And get this drum going, so let's get the drum going. Benny, Mona, let's get the drum going. George Bass and...: (singing inaudibly and clapping) George Bass: You improvise, you improvise. You're a drum, you're a drum. George Bass: Right, right. George Bass: Right, right, right, right, right. George Bass: Okay, okay. Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. George Bass: Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, bring it down, bring it down, bring it down. Now all right, thanks. Beautiful, beautiful. Now, now you see what happens is that we begin looking for him, and we start looking in things, inanimate things and all kind of things, and finally discovered it in each other's eyes. And when we discovered it in each other's eyes, we finally realized. We looked up, and we had created a circle. And from that circle then we began to perform this ritual, this voodoo ritual called El-Hajj Malik. And at the end... Mona, do the thing at the end. We wrote something. Mona: Red, red, Detroit red. Talk about me some Black red. Mr. X man red. He saw a vision, a vision of red. Red led, you fled. Fled to a nightmare, a nightmare of chaos. What touched the red, that red bled? That red blood of a person. And see, and see a vision the color of your skin and the color of your mind. [inaudible]. Look to the midnight sun, El-Hajj Malik. George Bass: Okay, now that's how we realized that, and it came out of community. We came into a room and we sit down around tables and we talk to each other. And I shared with the students what I felt, and just like this, it happened. And just like that, Mona got the ending for us. And so I married her. Mona: Okay. George Bass: Okay, at any rate, we dealt with improvisation again though. Improvisation. We were improvising off of each other using something that someone had given to us, and we changed it. I mean, it was really out there. Had all kind of mess, we were doing... And everybody was Malcolm. The women were Malcolm, the men were Malcolm. Everybody. The role of Malcolm just kept changing because we're all Malcolm. We had discovered the spirit in our eyes, we're all Malcolm, right? Okay. So improvisation. George Bass: Now that was one experience where the audience sat here, boom, and looked there. Okay? The actors had improvised. I said, now what I really want to deal with though is the problem of that organic interaction between the audience... Not the audience. The people out there and the people up there because we don't have audiences. We don't watch, we participate, right? Okay, and we celebrate. So what can I do to create that? Then Benny and I were working on a project, and we created a piece using a play by Edgar White called Beatrice. We did a thing called Thoughts, Memories, Dreams, an Experience with Beatrice. George Bass: Now going back again to cultural forms and events. We took the experience of the opening of a art exhibition, which seems alien to us right? Talking about going to the opening of an art exhibition. You say, "What's Black about that?" Okay, but it was Black. Anyhow, we took the opening of an art exhibition and we dealt with the idea in souls of Black folks. That Black people live beneath the veil. So when you came into this building, and we're taking the whole first floor of this building, there was blue chiffon hanging over the door, and you had to deal physically with it in order to get in. George Bass: And when you walked in, you walked into an environment of cobwebs. We used cheesecloth and strings to create an environment of cobwebs, okay? Then over to one side in another room we had created a thing of beauty, and we were dealing with our racial memory. We were dealing with what had happened, our reaction to this New World experience, and so we chose 12 different kind of women, and we created environments for them, and we gave each one a history, and we wrote her up on a little blue card, and put it on the cobwebs, and put here in these positions, and she was a wax figure in a wax museum. George Bass: And the first one was... Benny: Rosalyn. George Bass: Rosalyn La Rue Harris, who was married to E. Wellington Harris, Esquire. And she would tell you, "E stands for Ethereal." And she was very grand. She would take you to Althea Wilson who was a maid. And she would tell you that, "I works for the Bradfords. You know the Bradfords that came over on the Mayflower? Well I worked for them, child. And when they moved up here from Virginia, they brought me up here. I was just a little girl in the eighth grade and they brought me up here and sent me to the main school and I graduated with honors. Yes I did." And the people would come and she'd serve them punch. And Black people would come up and she looked at them. She said, "Any white folks want some punch? Any white folks want some punch?" George Bass: And finally she'd begrudgingly give somebody Black, or if she thought you look cultured she'd give you some quicker. And she'd give you this punch, and she'd give you half a cup. And you'd say, "Fill up my cup." She'd go, "Niggers get only half a cup." And they improvised, and they forced the audience coming to deal with them. Now we had a beautician who was over there fixing hair. We had Sue Babe who was getting ready to go to a party. We had, what was her name? Shirah? Benny: Shezoulah. George Bass: Shezoulah, who was a militant, and she was there selling her papers and her beads and her incense and stuff. And we had- Benny: Miss Johnson. George Bass: Miss Johnson, a school teacher. We had 12 different kind of Black people. We had a Mother Africa too, okay. And Mother Africa didn't exist in cobwebs, though. She came out and looked, but she existed in a place where we had created a beautiful environment of paintings and sculpture and constructions that expressed the beauty that we have wrought in this environment. Okay? And she moved back and she said, "These are what my children have created." And then she'd come out and she said, "This is what they did to my children over here." Two different environments, but all within the racial memory. George Bass: And after you went through this experience, improvising and being forced to, and willingly so. Willingly so. It was not this imposed kind of stuff that happens with the Living Theater and Paradise Now where they come out and say, "I can't take my clothes off in public," and start taking their clothes off. "Marijuana's illegal," and blowing. That is to me false, that is false. What we must create are experiences that are not threatening, that do not intimidate. Because we come to the theater supposedly to celebrate, to be spiritually uplifted. We go to church on Sunday, and when we're spiritually uplifted everybody participated and they say, "Oh child, we had church today. We had church today." George Bass: So we come into our theater to have church, and we call our theater The Back Door. And it's a cabaret environment, because we finally had go to... We had to break out of that, so we have cabaret environment. And if you come through Providence this summer we'll be there working. Look us up, we're at Brown, okay? Now Benny, let's show them some slides, so you can get a picture of what all of these women looked like, these women who were in this experience of Thoughts, Memories, Dreams. Okay, let's just show them. George Bass: That's Mrs. La Rue Harris. Okay, go on. We can show them quickly. I just wanted you to get a sense of the environments that we created, and they're very simple. They're not ostentatious, you aren't threatened by them, and you just walk in. That's Sue Babe. Fine woman Sue Babe. And that's Queen May, and Sue Babe is there, and she knows she needs her wig fixed. And these are people who came to see the play. Those are not actors, those are people who came to see the play. And she snatched her with, "Girl, I need to do something with that head of yours, you look like a man." And then she's working on Sue Babe, just trying to get her stuff together. Benny: These are the cobwebs on there. George Bass: These are the cobweb scenes that you see. That you've created around. And that's Big Mama. Big Mama is sitting there making a quilt for her little grand baby. And people would go there and they'd talk to her, and that's Big Mama's daughter, Lavinia. Lavinia was at home doing the family ironing for the week. And you'd go and you'd talk to her, and she was a sales clerk at a grocery store. And they all had their history and they could talk to you about it. George Bass: This is Puddin. Puddin is Big Mama's granddaughter, and Lavinia's daughter, and she's there on the steps, just talking, talking to people. And that's Sister Newsome. She's the evangelist. Sister Newsome. Go on. There's Sister Newsome reading her Bible. Bless her heart. And that's- Mona: That's the sharecropper's wife. Benny: The sharecropper's wife. George Bass: Oh, that's the sharecropper's wife, at any rate. And she's there sharing peas, waiting for her husband to come back from town, worried to death because he hasn't come back. He's never been this late before and she's going around asking people, "Have you seen my husband? He ain't never been this late before. I hope them Ku Klux ain't got him." Benny: Excuse me, you have to talk louder, George. George Bass: Okay. Benny: The sound isn't- George Bass: Okay. And that's Miss Johnson, the teacher, the teacher, the schoolteacher. She's Puddin's teacher. Speaker 6: May I ask a question? George Bass: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 6: When the people from outside to the the play come in and they talk to these people, that is the play too? George Bass: That is the play, exactly. That is the play. Speaker 6: And they remain in character or- George Bass: They remain in character. An example is some student came up to Althea, who was the maid and said, "Arlene, give me some of that punch." She said, "I'm Miss Wilson to you." Speaker 6: That's right. George Bass: "Arlene, give me some punch and stop acting silly." "I'm Miss Wilson to you, nigger." And they looked over and they saw, they said, "Oh, she's in a play." So the actors forced the people to deal with them. And we all know how to pretend, and once you catch on, and it's only the dense folks that didn't realize what was happening. Okay, let's show them some others. And that's Shezoulah. Okay. And that's Mother Africa over there, looking at what they've done to her children. Okay, let's show the last one. That's Mother Africa in her own element, in her own environment, with her beauty. George Bass: Okay, now that's moving towards the mythic mode that we're talking about. Creating that community, creating that experience where you come in and you touch, and you participate, and no one is an actor and everyone is an actor. And then at a certain point in this production, Miss La Rue came down and she said, "Darlings, darlings, it's time for the production, let's go in now." And she took the people in, and they saw this play which was a memory play, which Benny directed so well. And the set was a huge head of this middle class Black woman with a screen in her forehead, and on that we projected images of what she was talking about and what she was thinking about. George Bass: And as she talked about these people these images would stop, and they would walk from out of her head, and they'd go into these scenes, these fantastic scenes, and we moved. And then she was searching for, "Who am I?" Her whole question is that. She's a middle class girl, unresolved psychological problem as to who she really is, and it goes on and goes on. And she confronts her mother, her father, her sister, her boyfriend. Finally her grandfather who points her to the way of saying, "It's through your folk. It's through reclaiming your roots, getting back to your roots, don't you understand?" George Bass: And she says, "All that I've ever wanted was love," and then all these 12 women from outside move in. "Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice. You are loved, you have always been loved. Frederick Douglass loved you, Nat Turner loved you, Harried Truman loved you, Sojourner Truth loved you. Harriet Tubman. We loved you. Anyhow, we loved you. Now you must love yourself." And they said, "You must love yourself." Out of that she realized, "I'm a Black woman. My name is Beatrice, I'm a Black woman. My life is the life of the continuum of a people. I'm a consequence of my history." And she gropingly defined who she was so that she could then have a basis for beginning to function intelligently with her problems. Okay? And that's what that play did. George Bass: Now the other thing, we're talking about ritual, we're talking about Games, we're talking about improvisation, we're talking about language. Music, now let's see how I can get into the music. Okay, improvisation. I'll be done with that. So we now have discovered a way of working with improvisation, okay? Now another way, which I might as well tell you about now, and it deals with ritual and another problem, and that's something that Carlton referred to yesterday too. He mentioned that in the Black church things are plotless, they're without plots. There is an arrangement, a pattern arrangement of things. Well yes, that exists, and we dealt with that too. George Bass: Now we started off by creating things we call patches, and we dealt with quilts. We used quilts as an image. We said, "Okay each person will write a patch, and then we'll get all of these patches together, and we'll see how we can shape them so as to make a beautiful quilt out of them." Okay? And we had 13, 14, 15 people writing different things. Now out of that experience we did a production in a cabaret in quote, the slum environment of the community. And we performed in the cabaret. George Bass: Now what we performed were sets, okay? The first set was a fashion show, called Lonely Women. The women came out and they modeled, and they turned, and the did their thing, right? And then while the commentator told who she was and what she was wearing and how much it cost and where it come from and when you're supposed to wear it, and then they stopped. And then she becomes who she really is, and she got into what was behind all that and what was under all of that. And she talked about her loneliness and her frustration. And then at the end she went back into this, and went off, okay? George Bass: Now, then we did another thing. We did another piece with that. Now these are things that we created never knowing. We just said, "Go home and write something." And they'd go home and they'd write it, we'd come back together and say, "Now what are we going to do with this now?" And we'd start talking.Very relaxed and playing off of each other. Coming together in true community. I mean, some fantastic things happened with us. People following... I'm sure Val knows all about those kinds of things. Val: I'm sitting here, both of us, standing on Harlem. What's really killing me is we're doing the same thing as we go into ourselves. George Bass: I'm sure. Val: The same thing. George Bass: Right, right. You're right, we're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, okay. The other piece we called The Buckwheat Revue, and we created a darkened minstrel show and people are doing all their things, then they froze, and they did this. And suddenly on the stage there was a person who was locked behind that mask, and we did it with masks on this particular evening. And we saw what was behind those grinning masks. And then they'd go back, and they'd have verses and choruses and they sang. Okay, now that's dealing with the cabaret as a form, okay? It's dealing with plotless things. Things that are seemingly plotless, but have experiences. And we finally did a thing called Mama Etta's Chitlins Circuit. Okay. George Bass: And we created an environment of a cabaret, and we used the Southern cabaret experience, and we took out all the legendary singers. Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughn, all of the great singers. And we had students go listen to those folk. We don't want you to imitate them, we want you to come to understand the base from which they sing, and get on stage and do your thing using them as a model and as a reference. Okay, we don't want you to imitate, because we are not about imitating, we are about creating. Creating out of things that we share, so that I'm sitting in the audience and they tell me you're Bessie Smith, Bessie Smith I understand that you're creating out of your sense of Bessie Smith, and that you're not trying to imitate phrase for phrase, beat for beat, Bessie Smith's record, okay? You must always remain creative, creative, creative, okay? George Bass: Now what we did though is we selected some bop singers, and the bop singers were narrators. And we created some poets who were just Black characters, and they then did commentary on these people. And they would do commentary in the bop style and in poetry, and the person would come out and pose in the spotlight, and they would come over, and they would sing their song and they would perform. And then there were people in the audience, and they would start showing out the way we do in nightclubs, right? George Bass: So we had two realities going. We had the reality of art, which was on the stage, and life, which was outside. And we had all of these spontaneous, but they were planned of course, eruptions, which juxtaposed and commented on what was happening on the stage so that you got this kind of thing going. This kind of thing going. So we are continuing to work and that is still working within our blues mode, our blues mode. The Beatrice thing was our jazz mode, okay? George Bass: Now the Black Masque thing, about the woman who had been pregnant for 350 years is the spiritual mode. The noble aspiration, this woman's trying to bring deliverance, trying to find a way out of no way, hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. Okay, then we said, but gee, one of he problems of this plotless form is that people have memory of an experience that they enjoy, but they don't have very concrete and unified images, metaphors, that they can hold on to and help them to realize what it is that they're doing, okay? George Bass: So now we're working with the problem, and Benny and I will be working with it this summer, of how do you take the seemingly plotless form and create story and character and principal line of action in it, okay? And we have notions, and we've talked about it, but I don't want to mislead you, so I won't go into that, I'll just say we're still working on that, that's the problem. George Bass: Now the final thing that I want to talk about is the whole thing of history, which is so important. Now in the history there are characters that we want to deal with, and again, yesterday we were talking about this think of hero, and where there's a hero, and we were talking about grace and style, and that we assign to heroes virtues which are essential to our survival. And we assign those, and that's how we make our heroes. That's how we create heroes. George Bass: So we have a fine young novelist on our campus, Darren Deckon, Black man. We have some very, very creative people all over, but we have some really creative ones at Brown. I mean, we have some folk. So what we had him to do is to write us a play on Marcus Garvey. He wrote a play in a very generalistic style, extremely generalistic. It was just telling the story of Marcus Garvey. Marcus Garvey, right? In a very surrealistic kind of form, though. And this was his first play, so it had a lot of flaws, because it was his first time to ever write. He's a novelist. George Bass: So we had the problem, now what do we do with this? We said okay, we work from the notion of the public image of the Black man, okay? So we began with a character sitting on the stage, who was a minstrel-looking character with a lot of papers on his back. And the image we were working from is, let's see. You see me sitting here. One day soon and it won't be long, you're going to look for me and I'll be gone, okay? Now that's the image. Now what we were working from is that Marcus Garvey was instrumental in changing the consciousness of the Black man. Moving him from a state of self-hate and denial of his own beauty, to a recognition and celebration of his beauty. George Bass: Now Marcus Garvey was destroyed in the process, but we as a people moved beyond that self-hate somewhat, and with the help of those Harlem renaissance artists too, okay? So we took that as a tactic, and we're going to show you some slides of what it finally looked like, okay? Now one of the things that we deal with in terms of history is that if you are not very careful you can fall into the traditional form of theater when creating historical drama, because you have all those problems of character and naturalism, and all of those things, and so it becomes extremely problematic to deal with history, and we again are investigating the problems of history, and how do you present history and historical figures on the stage? George Bass: Okay, now what we did in this instance, and you will see, is created a nightmare dream world. Everybody wore paint except Marcus Garvey, because they were all creations of some unreal world. There were the people who were his followers who wore colors, beautiful colors. And then there were the people who were agents of the system, but Black and white agents of the system, who were white paint, and some of them white with red, who were the whites, and others white with Black, who were Blacks, because unfortunately Garvey was attacked and criticized by Du Bois and Randolph Jacob, what's his name? Phillip Randolph, right? And the editor of The Messenger, I forget his name. Val: Owens. George Bass: Owens, yeah, Owens, okay. And there are people who criticized him. They regretted it the rest of their lives, because the man was ahead of them. They didn't grasp his vision at that time, but all of those people were in there and we dealt with those things. Now what we wanted to do was have people get something other than just the history, the retelling of his story, just as we did with El-Hajj Malik. We said we don't want people to come here and see here only the same thing that they can go get a book and know more about. So we tried again to imbue the experience and the production with dimensions born out of our understanding and our form. And I think with that I will close. I'll just summarize and then you can... Well maybe I'll show the slides and then I'll summarize, okay? We'll show the slides and then I'll summarize. George Bass: That's the principal figure that went all the way through the play, and just before each scene he would come back. You can continue Benny. He would come back in, and he would have removed a piece of his costume, or shirt, or pants, or something. But this is just to show you the character. And he'd been weighed down by mass media, by public image. Public image. Okay. George Bass: Those are the people who are waiting for Garvey. Those are the people who are waiting for this coming. And you see the whole set was newspaper, it was just all newspaper, with a red, Black and green stripe going across. Those are those people. They're waiting, they're celebrating his coming, the man is coming. There, he's coming. This is God, the character played God. Okay, go. George Bass: You see the paint there. They were talking about paint yesterday. Now there was a question about the use of paint and color. Now we have done... You can continue Benny. I just want them to see to get a sense of the kind of theater that we do, because we're involved in high theater, like high church. There was talk about paint, and we use paint often. But we have discovered that it's not the paint, it's the actor, and that you can use white paint for tragedy and comedy, for satiric, for grotesque. It's the way... The lines of course, and the tones that you use, but also what the actor does that will inspire the response, and elicit the proper response from your audience. Okay, you can go Benny. George Bass: There is his, stripped some. That was one of the officials of the Garvey [inaudible], the archbishop. That's Garvey with his bodyguard and the archbishop. He had the bodyguard. And in the play his bodyguard goes insane, because... He goes insane after Garvey is forced to return to... He's in prison first and then of course he's sent back to the West Indies. George Bass: This is a 74-year-old woman who was in our production, from the community. And she sang they hymn of the Garvey movement, that's what's she's doing there. That's Garvey and his wife, she's lovely to see. She wore paint too. She wore paint too. Now that's the great leader, she gave Garvey hair. The great white leader. We didn't have to say white, we just had to say the great leader. George Bass: These are the reporters, these are the people who plagued Garvey, those reporters. You see the big pencils? They're writing, they're writing lies. See there they are, pointing him. See? And this is Rudolph, not Rudolph. Randolph, right? Randolph. And one of them, Owens. One of them, I don't know. At any rate, and he's calling Garvey all kinds of names, and the person's just writing away, writing away. You see the red there in her lines and the Black in his lines, that's defining for us that they're different, although they are joined. They're brothers see, and they had white. And that's what they were doing to the man, they were destroying him, and that's his finally getting really strict. George Bass: The great leader again. This character's reporting to the great leader about what he as learned to destroy Garvey. Reporting to the great leader. She had a picture generally of Garvey which she would burn after she destroyed him. She would burn the picture and drop in her waste basket. And of course when she listened to the trial, he defended himself at his trial and she stood there as the judge and she ate popcorn and she yo-yoed and she drank soda. And she read comic books, and that's the man to prosecute, right? That's what they were doing to us and he was fighting back. And she was fighting back. And she was being strong, like our women are. And they were being strong and believing. Okay. And they were still working, okay. We're just about done. That's Garvey. George Bass: Now this is finally what he's transformed into, right? He has the Black nationalistic kind of dress, but he's still waving those papers, okay? Okay, go on to the last. And then suddenly everybody comes back and their faces are clean except this one, who went insane. They cleaned up and they all did because Garvey transformed them, and there they are. Okay Benny. See, there they are. The night is beautiful, so are the eyes of my people, whatever you say, they're beautiful. Okay fine, thank you.