NOT STRANGERS TO ART
Daniel Alexander Jones
Art was central to my public school education. Music, storytelling, and dancing were everyday things for the kids in my neighborhood. My community included poor, working-class, and lower-middle class families knit together by strong civic and cultural bonds in the 1970s and early 1980s. I spent much of my childhood in and out of the Springfield, Massachusetts Girls & Boys Clubs where my parents and my grandmother worked, where art pulsed as a central artery of healthy community. We were encouraged to dream by adults who often had not had the opportunities we’d had; they wanted us to soar beyond the limits of anyone’s imagination, including their own.
By and large, our expressions were born from within, and weren’t geared toward someone else’s idea of what an artist was supposed to be. I recall a far-off sense of people who were painters, poets, actors, dancers, et. al. In the mostly white towns surrounding our small city we sometimes ventured and encountered “artists”; but there was always a sense of remove, of us and them. Our most immediate and fantastic examples of professional artists were the performers who populated our daily lives with incredible songs and stylistic pageantry: Aretha Franklin; Stevie Wonder; Marvin Gaye; Diana Ross; Donna Summer; Michael Jackson; Prince; Tina Turner; Teena Marie; Melba Moore; Patti LaBelle; Sylvester; Whitney Houston; Earth, Wind, & Fire chief among them. Their aesthetic distinctions, and the subjects they testified about, helped us learn our capacity to feel many things simultaneously and to trust that each of us possessed a voice that had things to say about what it meant to love, to quarrel, to face hard truths, and to heal. They may have been luminaries but were born from circumstances we understood and therefore, truly, felt close even though their lives unfolded in stratospheric circumstances. They were not strangers.
Art was for living. Art was regular. Art was ours.
In 2023 I will mark 30 years of professional practice. From the inside, my path has had deep congruence, charged as it was through mentorship by an artistic lineage of iconoclastic, self-determining artists like Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Jessica Hagedorn, Rebecca Rice, and others who helped align my inner compass to enduring purpose. They lived the risks and joys of both independence and cooperative interdependence. My work, like theirs, colors outside aesthetic borderlines and sources its own sense of worth from the communities for which it is made and by centering the collaborations that engender it. I’m often, thereby, in tension with systems of valuation that dominate the field (popular legibility, political line-toeing, and acceptance of ideas of exceptionalism, especially). I have been so fortunate as to receive incredible support over the years, but that has almost exclusively come in the form of material investments determined by panels of peers who often work with insurgent intent, to make visible artists and their work operating in inclusive and idiosyncratic ways and to invite twin questions: what can this be? and who can it be for?
“Repping. @penumbratheatre EST. 1976. Company Member since 1994.” Selfie by Daniel Alexander Jones wearing a black Penumbra Theatre Company shirt and showing a peace sign with his left hand. Image courtesy of author.
I recently attended a convening and reunion at Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul. Artistic director Sarah Bellamy and her staff welcomed company members and community home. (I first performed with Penumbra in 1994). Folks came together to engage the company’s evolution into The Penumbra Center for Racial Healing and Justice. I was struck by the congruence of this unfolding with the longstanding mission of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center (founded in 1929) home to Penumbra since its independent founding in 1976. Hallie Q. Brown (as it is most often called) serves as a marker of the Rondo neighborhood that was razed like so many Black neighborhoods during the construction of the national interstate highway system. (The North End of my own hometown, where both the Girls & Boys Clubs were located, faced a similar fate). Hallie Q. Brown today is similar in many ways to Pillsbury United Communities, a center across the river in Minneapolis which houses Pillsbury House + Theater. Both were born of the settlement house and community center movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that had particularly powerful impact upon poor and working class communities across the nation, particularly in cities that received immigrants (including those Black folk who migrated within the United States from the Jim Crow South to northern urban centers). Today, immigrants from around the globe find footing in these centers and others like them across the country. And, in the case of Penumbra and Pillsbury, the centrality of the arts is evident. Both theatres, for example, have had open-rehearsal policies to welcome young and old to hang out and witness the process unfold and thereby cultivate deep personal connections to the resulting work. I was especially moved to note that two of the three visionary new co-leaders at Penumbra had both been kids who did just that and who grew up knowing art was for living, was regular, was theirs.
“Part of truly healing the razed places in our collective imagination is, in my view, a recognition of the wholeness of beings, of communities, and of narrative contexts for both.”
If we value artists as exemplary of communities rather than exceptions to them, how might we broaden our view of the meaning and purpose of an artistic career? Even among the superstar musicians I named earlier whose songs populated my upbringing, there remained a strong connection to the communities they came from, of the responsibility they all walked with to uplift others on their journey, and of the dangers encountered when entering contexts that consumed and discarded their gifts — or flattened the meanings of their work in service of crossover singularity. Part of truly healing the razed places in our collective imagination is, in my view, a recognition of the wholeness of beings, of communities, and of narrative contexts for both — as well as a recognition of the true heterogeneity of meanings for all these things. I invite myself, and others, to ask what, for us each (alone and together) is art that’s for living, art that’s regular, art that’s truly, wholly, ours?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Alexander Jones is hailed by audiences, colleagues and critics as a groundbreaking and visionary artist. Over 25 years into his distinctive interdisciplinary practice, Jones deftly weaves performance art, theatre, music, writing, and teaching into a wildflower body of work. Daniel is a Producing Artist for the Center for New Performance at CalArts, and recently published LOVE LIKE LIGHT (53rd State Press) a collection featuring 7 of his performance works alongside essays by contributors from the fields of theatre and live art. You can find him on Facebook and Instagram @danielalexanderjones and on Twitter @mrdanieljones
