Hope Full: NBTF shows use words and images

Images, music and the words of poet Kwame Dawes will be featured in two multimedia productions being shown together as part of this year's National Black Theatre Festival.

Wisteria is about a group of women who grew up in the American South in the years before the civil rights movement. HOPE: Living & Loving With HIV in Jamaica follows people coping with HIV/AIDS in modern day.

Both productions were written and are performed by Dawes, a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Wisteria is the result of an idea Dawes had when he was a volunteer at a resource center in Sumter, S.C., in the early 1990s. There, he got to know a group of people who were in their 70s and 80s.

"I was curious about how they contended with living through the period of Jim Crow, and how they remembered it today," Dawes said from his home in Columbia, S.C. "I asked them questions, and they told me their stories, one right after the other."

He spoke with eight women and two men, recording their conversations.

"The experience was extremely powerful to me," Dawes recalled. "They took me into their lives and their memories."

Dawes knew that the people who had grown up in that era were aging, and that he should interview them about their experiences while they were still living. And he knew that many young people would be unfamiliar with their stories.

"Working at the resource center, I talked with young people about their grandparents, and they seemed disinterested in the past, and sadly ignorant about the past. I was trying to impress upon them the rich knowledge and memory of their grandparents, collecting their voices to have a kind of record and share it with their kids."

He began writing poems about their experiences, he said, as "part of the way I started to process this (experience). In reflecting, I ended up writing a series of poems.

"The poems are a poetic engagement with their narratives; I'm not trying to be their voices."

Years later, Dawes published a book of his poems titled Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country, and talked with Kevin Simmonds, a musician who wanted to collaborate with him.

"I gave him the poems," Dawes said, "and he set many of the poems to music and pulled together a wonderful ensemble of musicians. It became a performance with poetry readings, music, and orchestration. It had a great impact when we first staged it here in South Carolina."

The production focuses on the stories of the eight women he interviewed, but not the men. "It made it more coherent as a project," he said. "One of the poems in the collection is for one of the men, but the focus of the performance is entirely on the women."

During the performance, images are projected on a screen from the work of Richard Samuel Roberts, a photographer in Columbia, who took pictures of families, weddings and such in the 1920s and 1930s. "These images are not the same ladies, but they are from the same period," Dawes said.

The second half of the production, HOPE, was the result of a collaboration between Dawes and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Jon Sawyer, the executive director of the Pulitzer Center in Washington, said that the center had gotten a grant to report on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. After a more straightforward piece for its first report on the subject, the center wanted to do something different for a follow-up. "What we wanted was to get at the human face of HIV/AIDS," Sawyer said, "and get people to look at it a different way than they had before."

A colleague at the Virginia Quarterly Review recommended that he talk with Dawes.

"Jon Sawyer asked me if I'd be interested in doing ... an investigative journalism article on HIV and AIDs in Jamaica," Dawes said.

Dawes was raised in Jamaica, frequently visits family there, and is the cofounder of the Calabash International Literary Festival there. But he didn't think he was the right person for the job.

"I quickly told him I'm not really a journalist, I'm an artist and a writer," Dawes said. "But he said they were very interested."

Sawyer persuaded Dawes to take part in the project. Dawes visited Jamaica five times over a four-month period, interviewing people who were living with HIV/AIDS as well as young people to see what their perceptions of the problem were like. He wrote the article, but once again, he also began writing poems on the subject.

"I'm a poet, again, so I tend to respond to experience by writing poetry," he said.

When Sawyer heard about the poems, he started talking with Dawes about using the poems for a multimedia Web site that would accompany the main story.

A photographer, Joshua Cogan, took his poems and traveled back to Jamaica, using them as inspiration as he sought out images to accompany Dawes' words. "He said he used the poems as his map," Dawes said. "What resulted was the HOPE Web site."

For the multimedia site, www.livehopelove.com, Dawes suggested commissioning Simmonds to write new musical pieces to accompany the photos and narration. The site has been nominated for an Emmy award. Other aspects of the multimedia presentation involved YouTube and public radio. And now, it has spun off in another direction entirely, as a stage production.

Dawes has been attending the National Black Theatre Festival frequently since 1996 and has served on a committee for the festival, but had never performed at it.

Wisteria and HOPE run about an hour each, with a 14-member ensemble consisting of Dawes, singers and musicians. Dawes decided that the two pieces could be performed back to back.

"My feeling was that it would be a tremendously exciting production, with two tones and two moods of experience," Dawes said. "I felt they were strong things that could work well together."

"It's been remarkable to me how much of an impact (HOPE) has had, and how many different ways we've been able to take it out to people," Sawyer said. "The heart of it is Kwame's voice and his encounters with people in his home country, and his bringing it to life."