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It began two years ago with an opportunity to collaborate with nationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Sekou Sundiata as he began work on his newest creative endeavor. Now, Lafayette students who contributed original poetry, prose and photographs to The America Project: the 51st (dream) state can help celebrate it’s national premiere.
The America Project:the 51st (dream) state premieres Nov. 8, 10 and 11at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Many of the Lafayette students who were involved in the early development of the piece are planning to attend the Friday, Nov. 10 performance, which will feature a post-show audience discussion with Sundiata.
After a yearlong residency at Lafayette, Sundiata continued to develop the 51st (dream) state at Stanford University, Eugene Lang College at New School University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and University Texas, Austin.
A multi-media examination of the contemporary American experience, the 51st (dream) state is a galvanizing soul search for our identity through Sundiata’s poetic and personal “State of the American Soul” address. The adventure reconciles humor, hatred, poignancy and joy in its quest to find a vision of what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in a deeply complex world. A work for the people, the 51st (dream) state comes from the people and reveals a dizzying spectrum of opinions, beliefs, anxieties and passions about who we are, what the rest of the world thinks of us and what keeps us going. As directed by Christopher McElroen, the show’s rousing cycle of songs, poems, images and dance becomes a call to civic and artistic action.
The Lafayette community first met Sundiata during the Class of 2008’s First-Year Orientation, which kicked off his yearlong residency at the College. The residency was cosponsored by Imagining America, a consortium of nearly 80 colleges and universities sharing a commitment to public scholarship. It is serving as a model for similar endeavors by other consortium members.
“Lafayette College played a critical role in the development of the 51st (dream) state by providing a year-long residency that allowed me and my collaborators to think and work without the pressure of producing a show at the end,” says Sundiata. “Lafayette was both a laboratory and an incubator for intellectual content and important engagements with students, faculty and community. This is where a great deal of my thinking about this work began to take shape.”
Sundiata adds, “By including this residency in the First-Year Program, Lafayette provided a model for artist/campus collaborations that have an impact at the curricular level. This may be the greatest value of our experience at Lafayette College.”
Lafayette students involved in the project include George Armah ’08 (Accra, Ghana), English major Kiira Benzing ’07 (Ridgewood, N.J.), Danielle Bero ’07 (Astoria, N.Y.), Karen Bouldin ’08 (Everett, Wash.), art major Davita Crawford ’05 (West Orange, N.J.), international affairs major Maly Fung ’07 (Fresh Meadows, N.Y.), Dora Johnson ’08 (Yonkers, N.Y.), Al-Amin Kheraj ’08 (Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania), Diana Galperin ’08 (Warminster, Pa.), Jacquelynn Molzon ’08 (Saratoga, Calif.), English and international affairs double major Danielle Pollaci ’06 (Trenton, N.J.), Karen Ruggles ’08 (Easton, Pa.), and Allison Thompson ’08 (Saddle River, N.J.).
The students volunteered to work with Sundiata after seeing his Orientation performance. They met with him a number of times throughout the year to stimulate group discussion of topics and provided him with their writings and photographs.
The students made two presentations of their ongoing work in November 2004, one at the College, the other to an audience of more than 100 deans, professors, and administrators from schools across the United States at the Imagining America consortium’s national conference. In addition, Sundiata presented an early version of the 51st (dream) stateon campus April 29 and 30, 2005.
Involvement in the 51st (dream) state deepened the students’ exploration of the theme of their first-year experience, “Imagining America,” which uses the creative arts as a vehicle for exploring American identity and for knowledge-making and liberal learning.
“The effectiveness of art is that it enhances critical dialogue because you can portray emotion and feeling through it,” says Ruggles, a photographer and writer for the project. “The dialogue blended with the multimedia [elements] will be more effective, more touching, than just words.”
“The America Project is mixing art with politics, economics, and social theory – the things we learn in class,” adds Kheraj, a writer for the project. “It’s one thing to talk about an issue and another to present it as an art form because in art there is emotion, all sorts of things that can make the idea come alive. Seeing an idea is more effective than just hearing it.”
Lafayette’s First-Year Orientation program, “Imagining America,” has received national recognition. Now in its third year, the program, which began with the class of 2008 and Sundiata’s residency, continues to introduce new students to Lafayette’s intellectual and academic life. The program explores issues related to America’s identity, human security, and civil society, with the visual arts serving as a catalyst for intellectual dialogue.
Orientation for last year’s incoming students began in the summer with internet-based discussions about the graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman. The students also viewed a documentary film on DVD, created by Lafayette students and faculty, that illuminates the diversity of views about Spiegelman’s book within the campus community. Other exhibits and programming carried the theme through the year.
Lafayette’s newest students, the Class of 2010, viewed the film Crash over the summer. They also read a guide to “reading” the film authored by faculty members and, during the fall semester, are interacting with artist-in-residence Ping Chong. Activities include talks, installations and performances, built around his ongoing Undesirable Elements series of theater works, which explore issues of race, culture, and identity in the lives of individuals in living different American communities.
Sekou Sundiata is a poet who writes for print, performance, music and theater. He has been a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow, a Columbia University Revson Fellow, a Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), the first Writer-in-Residence at the New School University, and he is currently a Lambent Fellowship in the Arts Fellow. He was featured in the Bill Moyers’ PBS series on poetry, The Language of Life, and as part of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO. Sundiata is currently a professor at Eugene Lang College in New York City.
He has written and performed in highly acclaimed performance theater works The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop, which toured nationally and received three AUDELCO Awards and a BESSIE Award; The Mystery of Love, commissioned and produced by New Voices/New Visions at Aaron Davis Hall in New York City and the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia; and Udu, a music theater work produced by 651 ARTS in Brooklyn and presented by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, the Walker Art Center and Penumbra Theater in Minneapolis, Flynn Center in Burlington, VT, the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Miami-Dade Community College in Florida.
blessing the boats, Sundiata’s first solo theater piece, opened in November 2002 at Aaron Davis Hall, NYC and has since been presented in more than 30 cities and continues to tour nationally. March 2005, Sundiata produced The Gift of Life Concert, an organ donation public awareness event at the Apollo Theater that kicked off a three-week run of blessing the boats at the Apollo Theater SoundStage. These projects were produced in partnership with the Apollo Theater Foundation, the National Kidney Foundation and the New York Organ Donor Network with support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Sundiata’s first recording, the GRAMMY nominated The Blue Oneness of Dreams (Mouth Almighty/ Mercury), and its successor, longstoryshort (Righteous Babe Records), are both rich with the sounds of blues, funk, jazz and African and Afro-Caribbean percussion. He has toured internationally with his band; in 2001, they performed in 23 cities in the United States and Canada as part of Ani DiFranco’s “Rhythm and News Tour.”