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I. MELISMATA, (2020) by Tiona Nekkia McClodden

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I. MELISMATA, (2020) by Tiona Nekkia McClodden

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"...Tiona Nekkia McClodden has conducted a meticulous process in which she has separated vocals from music in over sixty gospel songs (most of which are live performances) to isolate the runs. The collection of vocals were then arranged in a long-form continuous vocal run. The singing featured in the piece are recordings from the early twentieth century to the present, codifying an enduring archive of vocal stamina. The work recalls the artist's experience growing up in a devout church environment; during her childhood. McClodden often found sanctuary in listening to gospel cassette tapes on her personal Sony Walkman stereo player. Her meditation on the run also invokes the fugitivity and ephemerality of this particular singing style. Runs can be improvisational, altering course midway through the riff, and they align with many of the expressive movements and sound-based gestures in the Black church that are spontaneous, unplanned, and distinct."

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Accountability in Saadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments 

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Accountability in Saadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments 

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The aspects of church and feelings of spirituality can be felt.

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Challenging composure in Black Femme Vocalist- Lillian Lloyd

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Challenging composure in Black Femme Vocalist- Lillian Lloyd

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The capacious

What kinds of way can we start?

Where’s the respect for how I wanted to come to the room?

Room to give up?! Making space for difference

I’m going to make a playground, figure out how to play! LOL

Dancing in the space of indeterminacy? Where who you are enters?

Where is sovereignty in relation?

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1985 The Clark Sisters & Dr. Mattie Moss Clark in London (Interview & Performance)

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1985 The Clark Sisters & Dr. Mattie Moss Clark in London (Interview & Performance)

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ShiKeith

bodily surrender

Openness

Performative

black spirituality

encounter between the Holy Spirit

Clapping - shouting to express worship

Look at:

dancing in one spot #6

sermon for a longing in blue

Annunciated life

Sermon Set:

Sculptures and structures that are found in black churches

Questions:

How is difference named in the black church?

How can we be vulnerable that undermines the ways that we live?

What does inheritance mean for a queer being that is navigating and desiring communal worship?

How are spiritual desires constructed through the lens and experience of a isolated being?

My Relationship to the black church is MUSIC

connected through music...

Flamboyant as a choir director

We live in a homophobic world

Urgency and intensity

How can I cultivate a practice?

Scared space - a space where we can feel a sense of self. To reach something more urgent and more fundamental...something that is deeper ... something that is more extra existential then what the surface can allow...music allows us to really reach something within ourselves .. a space to be held and becoming.

a series of work that I’ve been working on.

water- relationship with bodies of water- blackness- our history- from slavery

A site of refuge - but also a site of trauma

what is a blue light basement party?

Hype Williams

Black people going down below into self.

Find feeedom in it.

- underground vernacular —- the Underground Railroad - the club -negro spirituals - basement parties - what are the connection between these? How can we investigate the underground? But we don’t want ti be under grounded.. we want to be released into the world. We want to be liberated..

James Baldwin- up above my head - chapter gospel singer ...

Praise Breaks on YouTube

Liberation - Freedom

Shouting slipping into something that is felt.

Praise is in community

Praise takes work

Praise you sweat

Praise takes your fleshly energy

Practice of Praise

What does praise look like? Or how can it be presented in new ways?

What’s the choreography from the church?

I want to use the choreography from the church.

A search to be held and to hold.

The use of sweat , water,

seeking freedom

Ashon new book:

Hammond organ it’s relation to blackness and queerness.

William and Brian from Philly.. they were together and William died of hiv.. and Brian cried

Disorienting nature can be liberation

Boundless

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Interview with Wayson R. Jones (Essex Hemphill's Best Friend and Artistic Collaborator) 

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Interview with Wayson R. Jones (Essex Hemphill's Best Friend and Artistic Collaborator) 

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How would you describe your relationship with the late great Essex Hemphill?

I would sum it up as a great friendship founded in the experiences of our youth and first coming out as gay, our mutual love of music and the spoken word, and the synergy those elements created. Aside from my parents, he probably had more influence on my life than anyone. I can't imagine who I would be had I not known him, been his friend, and worked with him as a performance partner.

I first met Essex as a college freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park. I'd been housed in the dorm for about 2 weeks because, as a music major, I came to campus early to participate in marching band practices. I'd been "out" for about 6-8 months and already knew I would seek out the gay student organization on campus, having heard members of the group interview on the "Friends" show on Georgetown University radio earlier that year. We lived in what was supposed to be a single dorm room, so ironically, the result of what well may have been a racist move of cramming us together resulted in the serendipity of our becoming friends and (later) collaborators. When Essex moved in, as soon as he walked in the door (literally, within 5 seconds) I said, "well, I'm gay, so if that's a problem you'll have to find another roommate." Essex took it in stride (and silence, if I remember). He wasn't really out yet, and I like to think I helped nudge him on the way a bit.

We hit it off immediately, mainly through our love of music and pot smoking. Essex showed me some of his poetry written in high school, some images of which I still recall: something about coming home after a hard day's work to "count the brown pennies of this day." Essex was an imagist poet. His greatest strength, I think, was to deliver a really powerful message wrapped in a compelling visual image or metaphor. We didn't really dwell on his writing that much as roommates though. We explored the culture of the early to mid 1970s, which, contrary to the stereotypes of cheesy-ness, was really revolutionary. Saturday Night Live had just started that year, and it was astounding. We also enjoyed Monty Python's Flying Circus. We listened to music of mine like progressive/psychedelic rock (Yes, Pink Floyd) and Essex's jazz collection (early George Duke, ECM label works, female jazz vocalists). This kind of cultural sharing was foundational to our later artistic relationship.

Essex dropped out of school in sophomore year and moved to Los Angeles. I remember thinking how brave it was to move all the way across the country like that. Like many men, he left town to complete his process of coming out. When he returned after a few years, we hung out occasionally. Around 1980 or so, Essex began performing with Larry Duckette, and the two of them created the "choral poetry" style we became known for. Brass Rail is the iconic example of this style, with its weaving of the voices (see my YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Wayson+Jones; skip the ad and rewind the track!). The main tenet of our approach, as I later understood it through experience and my conversations with Essex, was to consider the voice as an instrument and the poems as music. Although we spoke, and did not (generally) sing, we explored the nuances of pitch, rhythm, and inflection in the voice from a musical perspective. My history as a music major, and our common trait of sensitive musicality, made these explorations natural and fruitful. I'm speaking of both my later duo work with Essex and the trio Cinque, as Larry was also a musician.

So, after Larry and Essex had been performing for a while, Essex and I met for lunch one day (in '82 maybe?), and he invited me to join forces with them as an instrumentalist. This was limited to incidental, "sound effect" types of things with handheld percussion, bamboo flute, and the like. In fact, the first time I performed with them, at the ENIKAlley Coffeehouse, I was up in the loft area while Essex and Larry performed below on the ground (main) level. That isolation quickly ended, and I became a voice in Cinque as a performance poetry trio.

That's all for now; more to come. But, please tell me if I'm giving too much information in response to your question!

Thanks,

Wayson

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Interview with Wayson Jones (best friend and longtime collaborator with Essex Hemphill) 

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Interview with Wayson Jones (best friend and longtime collaborator with Essex Hemphill) 

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Black Queer Artifacts’ what does that bring to mind? (memories, smells, pictures, time etc.)

Although artifacts are generally understood as tangible items like books, papers, etc., I'd say, in order of prominence (and somewhat chronologically): music, pictures (i.e., photos, film), literature. The first thing it brings to mind for me is music and musicians, specifically vocalists. From Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me," Lucille Bogan's "B.D. [bulldagger] Blues," and Gladys Bentley's cross-dressing in the 1920s-30s to Sylvester and Blackberri in the 1970s and onward. The time of the Harlem Renaissance was burgeoning in terms of Black gay and lesbian culture and visibility, as it was in urban culture in large cities generally (i.e., the "pansy craze"). We can still listen to those old blues songs today, 100 years later. A lot of the pictures are related to music in my mind. There are pictures of the cross-dressing cakewalk couple from the late 1800s, through Gladys Bentley and other "bulldagger" black blueswomen.

Films like The Queen, though not primarily(?) about Crystal LaBeija, are icons of ballroom culture. The 1967 "Portrait of Jason," although somewhat voyeuristic, is a stunning work. Then of course came Looking for Langston, and Tongues Untied.

In terms of literature, although the Harlem Renaissance was black and queer, the queerness is muted. I believe Billy Strayhorn was more out than the lot of those writer put together (except maybe Bruce Nugent).

I think that before we had institutions like black gay churches and political groups, our artifacts came from the arena of popular culture.

I'd have to count my own experiences as part of black queer artifacts (of the more usual kind as I noted above: flyers, posters, books, performance programs). I donated a large portion of my Coffeehouse and Essex Hemphill memorabilia to the Schomburg Center quite a few years ago. I've attached just a few items. The photo with Cinque (Essex, myself, and Larry Duckette, by our friend Sharon Farmer, who went on to become White House photographer with the Clinton administration) represents the first iteration of my performance history with Essex.

I think the DC area is a particularly rich source of black queer artifacts because of the seminal nature of many things that had their origin or were located here: Black Gay Pride, Us Helping Us (first AIDS service organization founded by Black Gay Men), and others. I'll send some images of politically oriented stuff in a separate message.

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For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

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Caught in the rapture
Touched by moments
Moved--> To keep being moved!
Move members move
Movements move

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On Feeling- Black Queer and Femme Labor Present 

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On Feeling- Black Queer and Femme Labor Present 

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“It was about praise and worship, not showing off or glorifying oneself”

Why is it necessary to engage in how we are experiencing our bodies when it is time to perform. Posture of the vocalist, closing your eyes, walking around, rocking in the choir stand

Exhausting the lingering-->choreographic intent (having your desires as expressed clearly and having them felt, choreographic empathies?)

Deciding whether or not something is in service to choreographic intent or in service to the proof of execution, rather showing or proving the worth of the body on the grounds of physical generation. Oop

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what do studied dance techniques signify?
what do urban/ritual forms signify?

what generates from much of what we fine?
what becomes the expression?
What is legitimizing the expression?

How do we understand this within the contemporary?

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Second Line- The Wake
Black Clubs- Speakeasies, Black Underground
"Inner City"
“Urban centers”
Subversion--> Underground--> A peculiar privacy-->the basement of the church
Conservative Bodies by day  vs. Grotesque Bodies by night

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Study + occasion- Tommie and his friend studying the parts of the choir. (We can do this)?

Collectivity + frequency- Together every Sunday

BlackSociality + praxis- Divide- queerness in discrete entities- to live and learn in community-community pending

disciplining and specificity and specialization- roles in the church.

Deep, expansive,

Rigorous + devotional practice- to move deeply

Clubbing- sociality- sermons on clubbing

Protocol See the place see what is around I want you to notice when I not around—>
When Black queers disappeared, did anyone notice? Did anyone speak of them?

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Choreographies of Protest, Civil Rights, Bodies as a site of protest and faith 

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Choreographies of Protest, Civil Rights, Bodies as a site of protest and faith 

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Create Interference
Disrupting the Status Quo
Publicly centering their bodies
Bodily autonomy
Bodies as a site of control and resistance
"the rule of silence" ---> holy reflection
public and body performance
intelligent readings of other bodies
Claiming of public space
Physical confrontations with architecture

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Creating for a moment--> "This is what I know how to do"
Responding to their conditions--> what did racism do to Black voices?
Urban/rurality
the residues of of cultural revolution
Shifting--> moving through the emotional registers of the wake-->functioning high as anti-Blackness as present
Second lining
Recontextualizing of liberatory practices
Adoption, Appreciation

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“Visibility does not constitute legibility—that is, being seen does not make one understood or appreciated.” - Jafari Allen

What am I provoked by?

Artifacts- One for Longing, One for Desire,

Where are you most evidenced collectively?

Where are you most evidenced individually?

How am I tending to structures that require less energy?
Am I evidenced when....

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Compound Urgency
Archival Perusal- the works of Black Queer Musicians in the church
Oblique points of entry- Tommie anecdotal evidences.
Create a set of unanswerable questions- What am I reaching towards?
Refuse to be informative - these moments are not explained. The way they occur is never explained
“Impossible” conjunctions- co-occurrence of two unlike things- Black queer
The archive is problematic- Black women as co-pastors and not pastors
Grounds the throwing off of shackles- ring shout, praise break, slain in the spirit, possession, falling out

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Ricky Dillard - More Abundantly - Going Home To Gospel

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On Possession- Catharsis, Release, To be Opened, to be Changed, to be moved, 

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On Possession- Catharsis, Release, To be Opened, to be Changed, to be moved, 

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Brings you back to a thing.

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Somethingelseness-->"I'm more than that" 

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Somethingelseness-->"I'm more than that" 

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Covers
Traditional- "Everybody sings these songs"

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Praise and Worship- Organized Happenings of spontaneity 

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Praise and Worship- Organized Happenings of spontaneity 

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Sampling
Steve Riech