Wanda's Picks Radio Show, Nov. 23, 2018

This is a black arts and culture site. We will be exploring the African Diaspora via the writing, performance, both musical and theatrical (film and stage), as well as the visual arts of Africans in the Diaspora and those influenced by these aesthetic forms of expression. I am interested in the political and social ramifications of art on society, specifically movements supported by these artists and their forebearers. It is my claim that the artists are the true revolutionaries, their work honest and filled with raw unedited passion. They are our true heroes. Ashay!

Today we host a tribute to Ntozake Shange. (We open with a prerecorded interview with the late

playwright, poet, novelist and co-director, Cassandra Henderson. October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work (PoetryFoundation.org).

Shange is best known for the Obie Award-winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. She also penned several novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), a novel about an African-American girl who runs away from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced that it acquired Shange's archive.[3] Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York (wikipedia).
We open with an Archived Interview with Ms. Shange and co-director of the Black Repertory Group's production of the play, for colored girls years ago.

Afterward we speak to writers and artivist scholars about Ms. Shange's impact on the personal and political American landscape via her skillful use of language, character, and color.  In imagined and unimaginable dimensions, she crafted with her work an embodied aesthetic example of black womanhood, humanity and how art makes one visible. Art is a light that burns brighter when suppressed.  

Link to show: http://tobtr.com/s/11075781

Studio Guest bios:

Halifu Osumare, Ph.D. Professor Emerita, African American & African Studies, University of California, Davis www.hosumare.com

Dr. Osumare writes:"I'm definitely down for the podcast on Ntozake. We knew each since 1973 in the Bay, before "For Colored Girls," and she gave me my African name. We have worked together off and on over the years, including me directing and choreographing several her plays for LHT and elsewhere. We last hooked up on May 17 in New York, where we gave a joint reading of our new books: she of her last book, Wild Beauty, New and Selected Poems and me of Dancing in Blackness, a Memoir.

I definitely want to pay tribute to my dear friend."

Lisa Marie Brimmer

Lisa Marie Brimmer is a queer, black, transracial adoptee artist and writer living in Minneapolis, MN.  Most recently their work has been published in anthologies: Whisked: Cooking up Community, Fierce Lament, and A Garden of Black Joy. They are a co-editor of the forthcoming Queer Voices of Minnesota:Poetry, Prose, and Pride. They have presented at Split This Rock! in DC, The Center for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas in Graz, Austria, and in Oakland for the Alliance for Study of Adoption and Culture in Oakland, CA in 2018. This fall they directed a Midwestern premiere of Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko’s WAAFRIKA 123, Nov. 2-11, with 20% Theater. @croptop_ceo & LisaMarieBrimmer.com

Lisa writes: 

“To be up front, I didn’t have a personal connection with Ntozake, but I did have mentorship relationship with Laurie Carlos (FCG - "Lady in Blue") for a few years before her passing here in Minneapolis. Carlos brought her experience with Shange into the room, almost as much as we brought to her. I always connected to the ways that Shange brought migration north into her work, and brought her work into her work: If i can cook/you know god can…., Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo. These two titles especially salient for me in this expansion year in which I have met more diaspora outside of Minneapolis near and far. In her words I felt Shange left me oasis after oasis. In poetry, yes, her poetry.

"She made space for peoples and women and black folks in plural… that’s how I think of her is as one who carves… connected to rivers and mapping mapping mapping. Shange’s force pushes you to be made available… in the most honest sense of the word. I’m indebted. She made it possible to shift in and out of tenses. So, to me, Shange made space for story and an approach; the kind that allows bare feet on the ground, and patchouli on the crowns of heads… and I don’t know if it was always there, if it was hidden to me, or if I didn’t know it could be had- she made it known that it could be had.” 

  

Claudia Alick's Tuna Casserole

Claudia Alick is performer, producer, and inclusion expert. Named by American Theater Magazine as one of 25 theater artists who will shape American Theater in the next 25 years, Alick has served as the founding Artistic Director of Smokin' Word Productions, is a NY Neofuturist alum, published playwright, recipient of NYC Fresh Fruit directing award, TedXFargo speaker, the Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists, featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and former Community Producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At OSF for ten years she produced events such as “The Every 28 Hours Plays”, "The Green Show", The Daedalus Project, OSF Open Mics as well as producing/directing audio-plays with OSF such as the Grammy nominated "Hamlet".

Her personal projects include her podcast “Hold On…Wait for it”, vlog “This Week in Cultural Appropriation”, StreetPoetry, and one-person Show “Fill in the Blank” exploring disability and the medical industry. Claudia served on Oregon Arts Leaders in Inclusion, the steering committee of TheGhostlight Project, the steering committe for Black Theater Commons, and is currently co-president of the board of Network of Ensemble Theater, She is currently the executive producer of the transmedia social justice company CALLING UP.  Visit: http://www.claudiaalick.com/




Nanna Mwaluko, no stranger to Wanda's Picks Radio Show, is Trans, queer, non-binary, Tanzanian-American, poet-playwright-fiction-essayist NICK HADIKWA MWALUKO: Plays include: 37, S.T.A.R: Marsha P. Johnson; two queer African trilogies Waafrika and Waafrika 123; the QTPOC trans masculine THEY/THEM (TBA/Theater Bay Area); the queer apocalypse Homeless in the AfterLife; Blueprint for an African Lesbian; SH/Eroe; Asymmetrical We; Brotherly Love; Trailer Park Tundra; Once A Man Always A Man; Mama Afrika; Queering MacBeth; Life Is About the Kill; That Day God Visits You; Ata; To Dyke Trans; Gayze and many more. Residencies include Resilience and Development (R&D) Writers’ Lab with Crowded Fire Theater Company in San Francisco (2017-2018); New York City’s EWG (Emerging Writers’ Group) at the Public Theater sponsored by Time Warner Co.; New York City’s Groundbreakers Group, Djerassi Artist Residency in northern California, Freedom Train Productions, Ragged Wing Ensemble and more. Nick is a 2018 finalist for Africa’s Gerald Kraak Award; a two-time recipient of the Creativity Fund issued by the Public Theater and Time Warner, and a 2017 Spring grantee of a Theatre Bay Area (TBA) Individual Artist Cash grant. Nick graduated Magna Cum Laude at Columbia University for undergrad and completed an MFA at Columbia University as a Point Scholar, the nation’s largest LGBTQIA scholarship fund, and was awarded a Columbia University Fellowship for theater at the same time.  Nick was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but dropped out.  WAAFRIKA 1-2-3, Nick’s queer African triptych, premiered at TheaterFIRST in Berkeley on May 2018 and will be staged up in the Twin Cities in November 2018 thanks to 20% Theater Company.