"When we revolt it's not for a particular culture.
We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe."
--Frantz Fanon
Ntozake Shange's new work, Lost in Language and Sound, is a poignant yet playful expose of her writing life. It lays bare her gestalt--the shape, figure, and form, that is, not only her body of work, but her story as well.
It overhears a radio broadcaster asking the central question of this choreo-essay, "...how would Zake introduce Ntozake Shange?" It is the hinge upon which three actors trade succinct, serial, soliloquies aimed at addressing this key question; albeit obliquely.
Two dancers must have had something to say as well (they were on stage, after all), but seemed constrained to express it. Perhaps this was intended; a metaphor to be 'read' theatrically.
Still the language told of "blood," "blood memory," and "dreams;" of her "blood trail" throughout the Old World, and New. It hits the ear slightly ahead of the musical bed, but just after tangled sheets of free jazz foreshadowed its musings.
The story it told riffs on a couple of her lesser known, but potent, choreopoems--namely, Spell #7 and Boogie Woogie Landscapes; re/iterating a through-line of Ms. Shange's oeuvre.
Here too, Lost in Language and Sound articulates the self-consciousness plight--the di/lemma of the Black artist 'coming to voice' where there is "no linguistic system besides the language of racism."
It is a language that occupies territory, and is always already "contested" and dis/figuring. Under such conditions, Ms. Shange admits even "the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing;" what Franz Fanon described as "combat breath." The story she tells.
Despite this, Ntozake Shange's Lost in Language and Sound bear the "elements of magic and leaps of faith" that mark her prior works.
In counterpoise to an authoritative "drop, freeze" breaking the fourth wall throughout the performance, one line resounds a definitive call to the audience: "Can you stand up, chile?" It ended with a special on Ms. Shange interjecting, "I still sweat when I write."
