Vol. 20 No. 4
Cleveland State University’s Black Studies Program in conjunction with the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs will host its annual pre-Kwanzaa celebration paying homage to the African Grove Theater at the 2018 Kuumba Arts Festival on Dec. 9 at 6 p.m.
The Howard A. Mims African American Cultural Center is home to the Kuumba Arts Program, which promotes the awareness and appreciation of Black culture through visual and performing arts.
“The way I see things after twenty-one years of coordinating productions like the annual CSU Kuumba Arts Festival, Black culture is an amalgamation of European and African traditions touched with other acculturated moments by other cultures, more or less defined, but resulting in something Black and beautiful,” said Prester Pickett, M.F.A, Cleveland Bicentennial play-writer.
This celebration will highlight Cleveland actors, including Leilani Barrett, Jeannine Gaskin and Kenneth Parker performing popular Shakespearean monologues. These monologues will take in an urban context, all produced and directed by Pickett.
“Basically, I’m using Shakespearean monologues and sonnets like pieces of fabric to sew a quilt together with the thread of African American music inclusive of Rap,” Pickett said. “Ideally, this Shake Spear urban quilt will be used functionally to cover a bed to bring warmth to the intended, but just as well aesthetically it can be framed and hung on a wall to serve, yet, another purpose.”
Cleveland State students, as well as students from St. Ignatius, Campus International School, Cleveland School of the Arts and Bedford High School will also showcase their talents in the event at Cleveland State’s Roberta Steinbacher Atrium.
“Overall, I’ve placed my brilliant team of actors, dancers, and models like chess pieces on a board to play checkers with only one collective rehearsal,” Pickett said. “Those confined by thinking that chess pieces are designed to only move one particular way, for only one particular game,” he continued, “have missed the opening in the code-switching intended to lose them in a labyrinth.”
Pickett gave a preview for the three acts.
“The question of what happens when iambic pentameter meets the rhythm of the tom-tom or djembe is already its own social commentary and how Act I opens,” Pickett said.
Pickett said that in Act I he drew from the Queen’s English from Shakespeare’s dramas, and placed it in context of both historical and contemporary moments to ultimately bring a message that resonates its queenliness only through the voice of Aretha Franklin.
“ACT II brings the love and romance of Romeo and Juliet forward as a spectacle,” Pickett said. “The sympathy and empathy found in the closing Act III for Shylock, Othello, Julius Caesar, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet or King Richard II is left to be judged against the backdrop of individuals like Travon Martin and even closer to home, Tamir Rice.”
Pickett also said the overall exercise of this project brings forward a lesson from Loraine Hansberry, who said, “in order to create something universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific.”
“In that, I’ve taken Shakespeare’s universal to attempt to acquire a better understanding of something very specific, in that, “this is America,” Pickett said.
Seats for purchased tickets will be held from 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. Afterward, seats will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis. For ticket information, call (216) 687-3655 or visit csuohio.edu/class/black-studies.