Creating a New Language

Pearl Cleage is quoted as saying, “What happens is that one brilliant person who did something wonderful for the race will be plucked out of whatever community they were a part of, and we study them in isolation. But they’re rarely placed in the context of a community of people. I was really interested in not plucking the person out of community. I didn’t want to write about Langston Hughes and Adam Clayton Powell and all of them. I wanted to write about the people who knew them […] because I think that we forget sometimes that these people are a part of a group of people. I think that’s real important.”

Working as the dramaturg for Cleage’s play, Blues for an Alabama Sky, I noticed that through all of her works Cleage focuses on a community, a community that is underrepresented, a community that stands behind or inside a larger and more well-known community. Cleage’s brilliance lies within her artistic ability to find these voices in the crowd of louder voices. For example, in Blues for an Alabama Sky, Cleage represents the struggling artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the social advocates and medical representatives of the Harlem Renaissance, and the migrants from the south to the north during the Harlem Renaissance whose identity is as fleeting as their locale. These are the voices Cleage chose to study and write about. Sure, she included the important figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell, and Josephine Baker, but only as a historical reference. The social, gender, and racial issues represented through this play are all voiced through the minority- those whom books are not written on.

This led me to think about community based theatre and whose voices that we, as part of this project, are obligated to represent. If community based theatre’s aim is to foster understanding and awareness, shouldn’t we then strive to find those underrepresented voices? Shouldn’t that be a subheading under the goal of creating awareness? And is this an obligation, a responsibility, or an aspiration?

I look forward to working with whatever community we choose and searching for the voices that have not been represented or heard in hopes of creating a new language.

I am writing to find solutions and pass them on.

I am writing to find a language and pass it on.

- Pearl Cleage