Many years ago when ArtWorks was first beginning, I was leading a group of students in a photography class. Part of our time together involved visiting museums and, lucky for me, a photographic show was on exhibit.
But as we walked from image to image, I noticed a few kids were lagging further and further behind. When I asked them why they'd stopped, their reply upended the balance as they became the teacher with one simple question: "Where are the people who look like me?"
They were right. There were no representations of African-American women in any of the images, much less any color at all in the black and white show.
Years later, while we do sometimes still struggle to fill the stage with folks who reflect the community's growing diverse populations, the 2013 launched Ebony Road Players (ERP) are making sure that the Black theater arts and education programming in Grand Rapids will continue to be visible here.
As a part of their mission "to inspire, educate and engage the cultures of our community with high quality, professional performances with a focus on the Black experience," the ERP will present a one-night-only performance of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange.
The story is a series of poems with the characters only indentified via color. Employing a form of performance known as the choreopoem, women on stage deliver poetry while moving about the stage as if in a dance performance. Each performer shares a challenge in her story that touches on topics of abandonment, rape, and abortion -- but also love.
And while audiences are well versed in famous Black theatre characters, it is Shange's first and most acclaimed play that captured not only a Tony Award nomination in 1976 but also became the 2nd theatrical work by an African-American woman to make it to Broadway. (The first one to get to Broadway was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959.)
On June 5, the ERP will stage another theatrical work, The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson, at the Aquinas College Kretschmer Auditorium.
Admission: Free, but since the auditorium seats only 200 people, please consider arriving early to secure a seat.
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