The Dressing

April 5, 2011, the Dresser dressed up to dip into a preview of the 2011-2012 10th anniversary season coming up at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center where the selected features were (their words) a Divine Diva--Ysaye Barnwell, Sweet Honey in the Rock composer of the cantata Fortune's Bones, and a Serious Kidder--Basil Twist, an out-there-on-the-edge puppeteer who created Symphonie Fantastique. Sitting among a group of exceptional student artists, well-heeled arts patrons, and welcoming University officials, the Dresser realized she had had up-close connections to both of the featured artists.

Dr. Barnwell's collaborator for Fortune's Bones is the poet Marilyn Nelson, a gifted teacher the Dresser invited to the DC area to give a master class in writing when the Dresser was organizing such writing workshops for The Word Works. From Dr. Nelson's Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, a poem about a slave named Fortune whose accidental death led to his owner, a Connecticut doctor, mining his slave's bones for educational purposes--in death, Fortune's skeleton became a medical specimen. From Fortune's Bones, the assembled audience heard soprano Shannon Finney's moving interpretation of "Dinah's Lament." Dinah was Fortune's wife, who was forced to clean the room where her husband's bones hung, including dusting his bones.

In 1998, the Dresser took her teenage niece to New York City for a whirlwind weekend tour that included the world premier of Symphonie Fantastique. After watching the underwater puppetry, Basil Twist invited the audience to come backstage to see how the puppeteers dragged strips of cloth through the tanks of water in a show that was psychedelic and nothing like traditional puppet shows since there was no human or animal forms involved. Twist is currently working with University of Maryland students on a new project that uses wind and silk cloth to create a new dimension of puppetry. This is what he and two students demonstrated for the preview show.

Other programs scheduled in the 2011-2012 Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center season that especially excite the Dresser are productions of Postcard from Morocco and Miss Havisham's Fire, two operas by Dominick Argento. For a full listing, visit the 2012 Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center website.

Here is an excerpt from Marilyn Nelson's poem "Dinah's Lament" that was interpreted musically by Ysaye Barnwell:

To dust the hands what use to stroke my breast,
to dust the arms what hold me when I cried;
to dust where his soft lips were, and his chest
what curved its warm against my back at night.

Through every season, sun-up to star light,
I heft, scrub, knead: one black woman alone,
except for my children. The world so white,
nobody knows my pain, but Fortune bones.

by Marilyn Nelson
from Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem

Copyright © 2003 Marilyn Nelson