Drumming up the Possible
by Jenifer Deal
Young Women's Drumming Empowerment Project is the single most important performative work in the DC area.
For many, Sunday afternoon in Adams Morgan means standing in line at Tryst or the Diner in hopes of fending off or drowning out the echoes of Saturday night's indulgences. But this past Sunday, October 24, The DCAC at 2438 18th Street was serving up vastly different and infinitely more nourishing fare than the eateries across the street. I ate my repast there at the counter and felt distinctly unsatisfied by my eggs over easy, but they turned out to be all I needed before I trotted across the street and up the stairs to the DCAC.
The crowd was thick and talkative in the gallery and we took in the well curated Space of Change exhibit with curious energy. In the catalogue exhibit Curators Margaret Boozer and Claire Huschle write that the works address the concept of liminal space, i.e., "the surrounding space of change itself." From Justin Rabideau's empty vessels and raked earth to Amy Kaplan's mummified/cocooned teddy bears, the exhibit was an apt visual aperitif for the main performative course being prepared in the theatre beyond.
When the house opened, the boisterous audience jammed the DCAC's tiny theatre to the rafters; people lined the walls, the stairs, and the aisles, and the floor was paved with an anticipatory audience of happy young people. In contrast to the quietly tasty musings back in the gallery, we were all sitting down to what would be a veritable performative smorgasboard.
A dozen African hand drums and accompanying chairs arced in a simple curve along the back of the tight playing space, and after the audience settled down, the lights came up and a dozen young women clad in individually styled yellow t-shirts strode confidently into the space and took their seats. Seated in the center, Kristin Arant, a tiny wild-haired redhead took a large drum between her knees, and with an eye-contacting glance to her right and left, struck up the rhythm, and we were off on a fantastic ride.
What a joy. When not beating out thunderous tuttis and solis in their rich drum line, the young women wove around the stage in and among themselves, delivering delicious vignettes in varying recombinant subgroups. Their poetry was stunningly complex and fully realized, the a cappella vocals subtly flavored, the dancing robust (nevermind the crowd of admirers at their feet!). And of course there was the drumming! Not a soul in the place could hold still, and the crowd erupted when the performers struck up a modified go-go beat.
Arant, the bubbly ball of talent, joy and fire who led the performance, founded the Young Women's Drumming Empowerment Project (YWDEP), and this project is a roots revolution from the heart, with the potential to bring new hope to the strenuously overused term of empowerment. Arant states on the website www.YoungWomenDrum.org that as an ostracized child, she finally found her sense of self when someone put a drum in her hands, and now in a dramatic example of paying it forward she has bestowed this same gift on these "Goddesses of Rhythm" as the program hails them.
These young women, the youngest at 13, are all teenaged students attending DC area schools, and the impact of the gift that Arant has shared with these fortunate young woman is as deep, rich and vital as the booming bass notes they beat out their djembes, and indeed the impact was far from lost on the audience who unanimously leapt to their feet at the close of the performance.
The visual explorations up in the gallery were subtly evocative in their respective space, and YWDEP's performance was the perfect complement. For both the performers and the witness audience felt YWDEP hit the play button on liminal time. We were suspended in the point of discovery: Young women becoming. Not the point where they have made their decisions and achieved all their goals, but that exquisite moment where we become aware of the infinite possibities within each of us.
The poignancy and critically immediate importance of this performance and the work of the people who developed it cannot be understated; Destiny is often a foregone conclusion for the majority of the women in our country, and indeed, the women on the rest of our frail Eden are screaming, starving and dying for change. The faces, voices and deeds of "men in charge" have choked us with duplicitous platitudes, grievous wrongs, and the booted oppression of the status quo. The thundering drumbeats of YWDEP shatters this paradigm, offering the mercy of something entirely different: the conscious discovery of the free will to choose to change.
In this respect they remind us of what has always been true. What these women are creating is rooted deeply within the simplicity of drumming, developed at the prelingual dawn of our species' consciousness. Humans have wandered far in the African diaspora, but our genesis lies in the soils of Africa, but no matter what the distance, geographical, cultural, political, we all prick up our ears when the drum sounds. The beat reminds us of our earliest conscious choices to interpret our environment and express ourselves within it. And the most current science indicates that these choices were not only responsive but also drove our evolution toward civilization. For the women of YWDEP and those fortunate enough to witness this work, the world is a very different space; it is a place where we choose what we will be. This world desperately needs the possibilities they embody, and the use of free will they engender in others.
I left that performance filled as I haven't been in any recent memory: sated with what I had seen, and with a distinct anticipation of what was next for all of us. I had visions of YWDEP chapters in every city and hamlet of America; Young women beating down the limited expectations of all who would confine them, gaining confidence to be who they wish, having the courage to empathize with people who are very different from them, and building a new society of love and respect for all creatures of the earth. YWDEP proves we can all choose the possible.
Originally published on September 27, 2006 at: http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/135920/index.php
copyright by the author. All rights reserved.
About the Author: Jenifer Deal is a Washington, DC-based actress. She received the Helen Hayes Award (Outstanding Lead Actress) in 2002 for The Source Theatre Company’s production of The Muckle Man. She was also nominated for the Helen Hayes Outstanding Supporting Actress Award in 2001 for her role in Dancing at Lughnasa (The Keegan Theatre). Deal’s recent credits also include Jason in Medea (Washington Shakespeare Company), Claire in Boston Marriage (The Source Theatre Company), Prospero in The Tempest (Washington Shakespeare Company), and Diana in Abducting Diana (Trumpet Vine Theatre Company). In October 2005, she performed SCENA Theatre Company’s production of the one-woman play, Amelia, in Slovenia.
