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<\/a>\r\nBates\u2019 Africana program this month holds up such discussions in an especially engaging way: drama.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Using historical events as a basis to explore white oppression and black resistance are five plays: four written by Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle, each based on actual incidents involving African American slaves in 18th-century New England, and a fifth, Janice Liddell\u2019s Who Will Sing for Lena?<\/em>, performed by Jes Washington \u201913.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Check out the times, dates and synopses for the five plays<\/a> staged by the Africana program during Black History Month at Bates.<\/p>\r\n<\/section>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Why theater as a vehicle for Black History Month programming? As a performance medium, it gives every audience its own unique experience, Odle says. \u201cIt makes things, to me, more immediate, more alive, more visceral.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u201cThere\u2019s a tradition of the dramatic form and black history that goes all the way back to W.E.B Du Bois\u2019s pageant plays at the beginning of the 20th century,\u201d Nero adds. \u201cThere’s a very deep tradition of black theater as a tool to educate about black accomplishment and to challenge anti-blackness.\u201d<\/p>\r\n The Fireplace Lounge in Commons is the site for readings of plays during Black History Month that draw on historical events to explore white oppression and black resistance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Washington, who has performed the one-woman Who Will Sing for Lena? <\/em>since 2016, was a rhetoric major at Bates and this year will earn an MFA at the Actors Studio Drama School, in New York City. Liddell\u2019s one-woman show depicts the true story of Lena Mae Baker, a domestic worker in Georgia who killed her white lover\/abuser in self-defense in 1944.<\/p>\r\n\r\n Jes Washington ’13 appears in two performances of Who Will Sing for Lena? as part of Black History Month programming at Bates.<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n A jury of white men quickly found Baker guilty of murder, and she was the first woman to be executed by the electric chair in Georgia.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n While Liddell\u2019s two-act play grapples with oppression based on skin color and on gender, it\u2019s a broad indictment of the abuse of power \u2014 or as Washington puts it, someone exercising \u201cdominion over you just for the sheer hell of it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Lena, a dreamer, is \u201cin the position where, no matter what she wants, someone is always dominant over her. She can’t get higher, because the person that is higher than her won’t allow her to do that. It’s her mom, it\u2019s her employer, it’s society.<\/p>\r\n \u201cShe has a childlike quality to her that is beautiful when it’s time to be a child, but not so much when she should be an adult. She never really learned how to be an adult.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n The headstone of Lena Baker in Mt. Vernon Baptist Church cemetery, in Cuthbert, Ga. (Photograph by 86billy86 CC BY-SA https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n Washington took the role, in part, as a way of coming to grips with trauma she suffered as a child.\r\n\r\n\u201cMost of the women who were approached to do this role had similar experiences to the character and it was a little too much for them. So they all turned it down,\u201d Washington says.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u201cIt was very close to home for me as well, but I decided that instead of saying \u2018No\u2019 and running away from it, I wanted to use it, to heal from it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Early on, she says, \u201cI was going through this process of healing, so it was more frightening every time I went up. There was only so much depth I could give it without crying uncontrollably onstage. But as the years have gone on, I\u2019ve allowed myself to think extremely deeply into the character. Lena and I are quite one at this point.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n At Bates, Washington belonged to the Modern Dance Company and was one of the students who founded Sankofa, whose Martin Luther King Jr. Day performances examine stories and experiences of the African diaspora.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Advised by Nero, her rhetoric thesis looked at colorism, prejudice based on skin color, within black and Hispanic communities. Her thesis materials comprised a 45-minute video documentary featuring interviews with a host of Bates folks \u2014 and<\/em> a 75-page written piece.<\/p>\r\n \u201cInstead of saying \u2018No\u2019 and running away from Lena<\/em>, I wanted to use it, to heal from it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n She and her interview subjects, Washington says, talked about the effects of colorism \u201con minority mindsets \u2014 what we think about as far as what is beautiful, what is acceptable, what gets you along in this life. Or some of the things that our mothers would say when we were growing up because they just didn’t know any better.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The products of assiduous research, including long hours in the Massachusetts Archives, Odle\u2019s Colonial-era plays scrutinize a period in African American history that figures less in today\u2019s consciousness than happenings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet there\u2019s an intriguing parallel between the macrocosm of Colonial society and the smaller black world within it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u201cMany of the ideas of liberty and independence that the Founding Fathers thought about and eventually fought over,\u201d he explains, \u201cwere ideas that African Americans were thinking about and fighting over, even more so because they were dealing with slavery on top of that.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u201cSo while John Adams and other folks can say, \u2018Yes, these powers a thousand miles away are going to make slaves of us,\u2019 there are slaves here saying, \u2018Well, you’ve already made slaves of us, and we’d like to have a say in this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\r\n Sam Alexander \u201920, as Phoebe, speaks to Quaco (Dawrin Silfa ’21) near the end of the Feb. 6 reading of According to Mark. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\r\n He says, \u201cBlack history in this sense is American history \u2014 it’s as much a part of the foundation of this country as Paul Revere’s ride and anything else any of the Founding Fathers did. So I think if you’re a serious about diversity, if you’re also serious about presenting different views of history, then you want to have a venue where these different views can be displayed,\u201d that venue being Black History Month.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Looking at the status of both African Americans and women, Odle\u2019s full-length Deerfield Homecoming<\/em> combines and fictionalizes two separate historical episodes that took place in Deerfield, Mass.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n One main character is Lucy Terry, a slave whose ballad poem \u201cBars Fight\u201d is considered the oldest known literary work by an African American. The other is Eunice Williams, an English colonist who was kidnapped by the French and the Mohawks as a child and became assimilated into Mohawk society.<\/p>\r\nFive plays for Black History Month<\/strong><\/h4>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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