Southern Voices: Black, White, and Blues- Glenis Redmond & Scott Ainslie
BIOGRAPHY
Performance Formats:
with Glenis Redmond and Scott Ainslie
The South is our territory. It is the place - the only place - that could incubate and give birth to the Blues, to Jazz, and Black Gospel music. The South is the common ground where we have lived together, often uneasily, but intimately. It is the place where the taboos against racial mixing, so ferociously enforced in every other aspect of our lives, never came to be applied to our voices: to their music, stories, and songs.
The sunlight and shadow of the South seem to fall across every significant Black, and many White voices in music, poetry and prose; whether rooted in the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta, the Southside of Chicago, or the hard scrabble farms of South Carolina. You simply can't comprehend America without some understanding of the South.
Southern Voices: Black, White & Blues starts out with a white man and a black woman on stage. Veteran blues musician Scott Ainslie and seasoned performance poet Glenis Redmond trade licks, vamp off each other, and weave stories, poetry and music together in a presentation of power and depth. It is history-personal and universal-that propels them as they take you to the mountain top and bring you home again. And though blues and laments are here, theirs is an unblinking gospel of life.
Glenis and Scott render a strength of spirit as they call on Muddy Waters and Zora Neale Hurston; Robert Johnson and Fannie Lou Hamer; celebrating with humor and love their own lives and the lives of common folk: family members, their personal heroes and 'sheroes,' and the work and lives of other striving artists. They feel what they share. And we feel it. We feel it all as they share humanity with its strengths and its foibles. Magic happens during the performance as they traverse this complex ground. And at the end of the performance, there are still a white man and a black woman on stage: we see them. We see ourselves. We see each other.
See Scott Ainslie's and Glenis Redmond's individual pages on this website and the links to their websites for further information on workshop offerings in conjunction with this performance.
