Southern Voices: Black, White, and Blues- Glenis Redmond & Scott Ainslie
SOUTHERN VOICES: BLACK, WHITE & BLUES
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
This powerful, stirring and thought-provoking production is a collaboration between Blues historian/musician, Scott Ainslie, and performance poet Glenis Redmond. Please visit each artist's pages on this website for more on Glenis and Scott. Related activities and workshop offerings may be planned in conjunction with a performance.
SOUTHERN VOICES SAMPLE
PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION
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 our music, our stories, our songs, our darkness and our brilliance.
The sunlight and shadows of the South seem to fall across every significant Black voice, and many White voices, in the lilting 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 Southern cultural landscape and its deep influence on our country.
Southern Voices: Black, White & Blues starts out with just a white man and a black woman on stage. Powerful magic happens as these artists traverse complex ground. Veteran Blues musician and educator Scott Ainslie and seasoned performance poet Glenis Redmond trade licks, vamp off each other and weave stories, poetry and music together in a moving presentation full of richness 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 real Blues and laments are here, theirs is an unblinking yet ultimately uplifting gospel of life.
Glenis and Scott pull on each other's strength of spirit as they call forth Muddy Waters and Zora Neale Hurston, or Robert Johnson and Fannie Lou Hamer, celebrating with humor and love their own lives and the lives of common Southern folk: their family members, their personal heroes and 'sheroes' and the work and lives of other striving artists. They truly feel what they share with the audience...and we feel it, too: humanity with all its strengths and foibles. And at the end of the performance, we realize it is still just a white man and a black woman standing on stage. We see them. We see ourselves. We see each other.
CONTACT US
SOUTHERN VOICES SAMPLE
PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION
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 our music, our stories, our songs, our darkness and our brilliance.
The sunlight and shadows of the South seem to fall across every significant Black voice, and many White voices, in the lilting 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 Southern cultural landscape and its deep influence on our country.
Southern Voices: Black, White & Blues starts out with just a white man and a black woman on stage. Powerful magic happens as these artists traverse complex ground. Veteran Blues musician and educator Scott Ainslie and seasoned performance poet Glenis Redmond trade licks, vamp off each other and weave stories, poetry and music together in a moving presentation full of richness 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 real Blues and laments are here, theirs is an unblinking yet ultimately uplifting gospel of life.
Glenis and Scott pull on each other's strength of spirit as they call forth Muddy Waters and Zora Neale Hurston, or Robert Johnson and Fannie Lou Hamer, celebrating with humor and love their own lives and the lives of common Southern folk: their family members, their personal heroes and 'sheroes' and the work and lives of other striving artists. They truly feel what they share with the audience...and we feel it, too: humanity with all its strengths and foibles. And at the end of the performance, we realize it is still just a white man and a black woman standing on stage. We see them. We see ourselves. We see each other.
CONTACT US