Essential Public Good: The Medea Project
by Jean Schiffman
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-January, in the Buriel Clay Theater at the African American Art & Culture Complex--home base for the San Francisco company Cultural Odyssey--nine women are onstage. Led by the multitalented and formidable theatre artist Rhodessa Jones, who is one-half of the Cultural Odyssey team along with musician/performer Idris Ackamoor, the women are in the midst of creating a new theatre piece, Dancing with the Clown of Love. This is to be the third of three shows in the company's 30th Anniversary Celebration of New Works (the first two, The Love Project and The Breach, opened here in February). It is a production of the Medea Project, founded by Jones almost 20 years ago as a program of Cultural Odyssey.
The women onstage, who are of various ages, ethnicities, sizes and shapes, wear leggings, yoga pants, T-shirts--rehearsal clothes. African music is playing on the sound system. Jones, a short-haired, statuesque woman with crackling energy, paces back and forth at the front of the house, tapping the palm of one hand with a wooden drumstick. Her black shirt is embellished with brightly colored images of Jesus. The performers are moving and gesturing in groups and individually, riffing dramatically on the line "I didn't know."
Dancing is a departure for the storied Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women because the community participants, who work alongside Jones's small core group of experienced performers, are not in fact prisoners but rather women with HIV. Some among the 15 or 16 currently in the cast of Dancing have been in jail, though. Most have had lifestyles that led to infection.
The idea for Dancing started when Jones met Dr. Edward Machtinger, of the Women's HIV Program at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center two and a half years ago. "One of my challenges to you would be to work with HIV women," he told her, "so they can find their voice, talk about their lives, their behavior, their fears." Jones agreed, and Machtinger began sending her potential participants.
A few weeks prior to today's rehearsal, Jones and Ackamoor took time in their office, several floors above the theatre, to discuss the show. "We started out being a group talking about where they're going," explains Jones. "It'll be interesting to see who holds up with health. Dr. Eddie keeps sending me people. They're writing everything--letters to Earth, to their children, about what we know now, about how we break our own hearts. One woman wrote this extraordinary piece, with religious images: 'This is my body, this is my blood.' They're not actors--they'd like to be. It's an interesting challenge to create structures. I'm still at the stage of discovery. We have tons of material. I'm putting them on their feet now, and bringing in different artists to work with them." Dancing has been in development for almost two years, through various stages. For the HIV participants who will perform in March, it has been a crash course in art-making.
Over the years of the Medea Project, Jones has formulated a process for working with untrained performers, involving structuring the piece around circles, squares and diagonals. "We start to build ideas: 'OK, this is going to be a circle and you've got like 30 seconds to go into a diagonal.'" The "HIV circle," she says, is at the center of Dancing. "I have an arsenal of ways and means now to step into the center of a group of women and bring some grace, some light, some laughter--some truth," she adds. "And they can write it down and we'll sing through it, we'll jump through it. I know the universal topics to talk to women about: 'Why are you so angry? What happened?' We're still looking for love in all the wrong places..."
The extent to which Jones works collaboratively is evident in today's rehearsal. Participants throw out suggestions; one core group member reads a long prose poem she's written about blood in all its vast permutations, from vampire images to the plaintive cry, "I'm losing my bloody mind!" The women discuss their personal experiences. "If I'm not interested in someone, I use that as an excuse--'I've got the Virus,'" says one. "Everyone knows what that is," agree the others. One of the community participants takes center stage, reads a piece she wrote about her blood. She was diagnosed in 1999, contracted HIV from her child's father. "Talk to your blood," urges Jones. "Gina, be the blood." Gina Dawson, Medea Project choreographer and a veteran of Dimensions Dance Theatre, jumps onstage, writhes on the floor, creates a palpable, physical entity that must be confronted.
Since its origins in the San Francisco prison system, the Medea Project has become internationally known; Jones says the phone never stops ringing, globally: "Everywhere the calls are coming in: Would you, could you come?" In late 2009, she and Ackamoor were in South Africa, working with women in prisons there. Prior to that, they'd been in a residency in Russia. She and Ackamoor are former lovers, now the best of friends and lifelong artistic partners. "We have weathered some interesting storms," says Jones. "We're a team. I love him dearly."
During a rehearsal break, as the cast disperses temporarily, Dawson describes how she is choreographing Dancing: by encouraging the performers to experiment with movement, then helping them embellish and refine it. "It's got to be user-friendly movement," she explains, because not all the participants are dancers. "I want something fun, powerful, funky, joyous and celebratory about our bodies." She notes that some of the participants have been living with HIV for 20 or more years. She wants Dancing to show that you can live with HIV and not die if you're body-conscious. Jones hopes the audience will get up onstage and dance with the performers at the end.
After the break, Jones encourages the cast to think and talk about what it means to be unloved. Later, she sings gospels in the background, in her deep, rich voice, while the performers sit in a circle onstage reading aloud from text that Jones has brought in for today's workshop, text she wrote about the AIDS death of Arnie Zane, life and artistic partner of her brother, dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones. At the end of the reading, Dawson breaks down; her own brother died of AIDS. "Give her the treatment," says Jones, and the performers surround Dawson, lift her up, carry her around the stage singing "A-men."
The "clown of love," according to Jones is sex. She took the title from Toni Morrison's novel Love, which infers that we as a culture prefer that "clown" rather than, says Jones, "the long conversation that builds and deepens a bond in a relationship."
Jones herself has had a challenging background. One of a dozen siblings in a family of migrant farmworkers, she had parents who were determined to educate their kids. Fellow migrants wondered why the Jones children, properly attired, were waiting for the school bus instead of out working in the fields, but Jones's mother would go ballistic if anyone challenged her on that. "Living on the edge of culture," says Rhodessa Jones, "you have to develop social skills, all kinds of wit, because you're only there for a minute, and you're already stigmatized because you're a migrant." She had a baby at 16, was a modern dancer who worked as a nude dancer to pay the bills for a while, as she told the Bay Guardian at Cultural Odyssey's 25th anniversary, and went on to become a singing actress, premiering her own solo shows, like The Legend of Lily Overstreet and Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women. Since joining up with Ackamoor in 1983, she has won an Honorary Doctorate from the California College of the Arts (in 2004) and a USA Fellowship (in 2007) and she and Ackamoor have toured nationally and internationally, performing, directing and conducting residency activities. Her works have been published in Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century and Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women.
It's a given that Jones has changed the world for many imprisoned women, as well as, now, for these women living with HIV. But Jones says more than anything, she herself has changed. "I'm becoming a master at the art of gratitude," she says. "I don't want to sound pious. I'm not a psychotherapist, I'm an artist who builds a body of work that's autobiographical, and it saved my life.... To be able to look back at where I've been, embrace who I am, be able to say out loud, 'This makes me angry, this hurts me'--to share it. To help [these women] know they're mythical characters as well. I know how to teach modern mythology, to make art rooted in that reality, to get people to stand up and sing their sorrow."
She will perform with the others in Dancing, and confesses to having occasional stage fright just like anyone else, fretting before an opening night, "Oh my God, why wasn't I a nurse, all that stuff--is there a house? Is anybody coming?" Ackamoor is the one who calms her down, telling her, "You know you love this stuff, people love you." Jones says her mother always told her she comes from a good-looking family, and according to the African adage, "Where much is given, much is expected." Says Jones, "If you come into the world kind of beautiful, you better step up to the plate. In The Legend of Lily Overstreet, I say, 'I'm here to inspire you,' and I really believe that.
"These women have all met the devil and found him to be very dull," she observes, of the performers she has worked with in the Medea Project. "There are wounded people here who in their lives have had nothing to do with anyone who wasn't manipulative, or tinged with violence. And suddenly they're gathering and they want to touch you and hold you and assure you everything's going to be all right. It's changed me. It's made me a much better person." She turns to Ackamoor. "Do you think I'm more grounded and calmer?" They laugh.
"Yeah!" he says.
"I love the work," she sighs.
In the Saturday workshop, Dawson is leading the performers in reciting the Lord's Prayer, with gestures and movement. "Wonderful, wonderful," murmurs Jones, watching.
Dancing with the Clown of Love runs March 4 to 14 at the Buriel Clay Theater, 762 Fulton St., San Francisco. Call (415) 292-1850 or visit culturalodyssey.org for tickets.
Jean Schiffman is a regular Theatre Bay Area contributor.
