Performance pedagogies for African American literature: Teaching Shange at Ole Miss

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2002 by Ethel Young-Minor

While some may find the comparison of teaching to performing troubling, teaching any subject often requires the teacher to stand before a class and embody or perform the meaning of that subject. All of us perform our own excitement and knowledge in our respective fields, and we also perform the need for our students to take our subject matter seriously. bell hooks further addresses the "performative" in good teaching, explaining that "... it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, land] spontaneous shifts" (11). When we yield to the performative in our classrooms, we generate excitement and energy. We also give students a model of how a person can perform multiple knowledges. In doing so, we map a way for students to explore their own connections to ideas, bodies and the larger world.

Performance of opposing ideas by a teacher helps relax and intellectually charge the classroom atmosphere. Seeing "authority figures" move between commitments exposes our vulnerabilities and demonstrates that we are willing to risk/relinquish control of the classroom fir the advancement of knowledge. This helps students feel safe suspending their own assumptions and acting out competing ideologies. Also, when classroom moments are clearly labeled performative, students can feel at ease giving voice to diverse ideas that activate critical thinking, challenge readings of the text, and--when most successful--impact how they view life beyond classroom boundaries.

TEACHING NTOZAKE SHANGE

To show how performance can be used to transgress in the classroom, I will share personal struggles with teaching Ntozake Shange's choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (FCG, 1979). I will discuss how performance of the voices in her text helped me challenge established knowledge patterns of students. Shange's poem is comprised of testimonials about different coming of age experiences for Black women. Patricia Hill Collins describes it as a text that "captures [the Black female's] journey toward self-definition, self-valuation, and an empowered self' (112). It begins with a woman's request that "somebody/anybody sing a black girl's song/bring her our/to know herself/to know god/but sing her rhythms.. let her be born" (4,5). It then progresses by sharing personal experiences that gradually let Black women "be born" on stage: the characters share girlhood experiences, adolescent challenges, and womanhood realities. They lose their virginity, sneak off to dances, exper ience date rape, abortion, physical abuse, and other traumas, but they are all ultimately healed at the play's conclusion through "a layin' on of hands," where they touch one another to heal their community.

My connection to the play has been personal from the time I witnessed a partial performance at a high-school drama tournament. A competitor performed a selection from FCG entitled "Sorry," exclaiming (in part),

One thing i don't need is any
 more apologies
I got sorry greetin' me at my
 front door
you can keep yrs/ i don't know
 what to do wit em
they don't open doors/ or bring
 the sun back
they dont make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didnt nobody stop usin my
 tears to wash cars
because of sorry.... (56)