The Last Black Stage

I’m submerged in the heap of abandoned ruins we call our archives again, digging for jettisoned aspects Black life. So much of Black people’s activity on earth has been singed and reimagined that it’s difficult to differentiate Black beauty from the aestheticized rotting of our neglected traditions. This time I’m searching backstage, digging for the moments before and between performances when everyone is most alive and the unedited personality slips the persona’s grip. I’m looking here because the white gaze does not know how to look here, except as reportage, so there are neglected codes and secret experiences that appear on the outskirts of intentional performance—listless or intense asides that become their own language of retreat and advance, their own music. 

I knew early on that backstage was important territory: I was born there. My dad was always between performances, and in many ways life at home unraveled like a rehearsal tape, as preparation for a performance. Home was always teetering on the border of private and public, full of undisclosed events, readying for something grand or visible. It was always dangerous in the way it’s dangerous to go behind the curtain or hear the speaking voice of your favorite singer for the first time, or watch him kiss or slap his wife. I knew nothing Black performers did onstage was complete, because I existed backstage, where the masquerade could not pass, where the heart broke and settled into its private fantasy, where grunts and drugs and ugly-slurring stumbles toward the imaginary audience to tell it about itself made up the real substance of our music. You can’t record those slurs and forced errors; engineers think of them as mistakes, glitches, even scandals. We must reimagine them as landmarks on the long journey to belonging somewhere without being property or prop, part of the way we reinvent ourselves when we become too popular to trust ourselves.

I see rehearsal space, rehearsal tapes, dressing rooms, cooking sessions, woodsheds, after-hours performances, and backstage as Black sacred spaces, places where we are most like ourselves, where we fray and ignite, where the real show begins and in some cases also ends or diminishes—formal performances being minstrel versions of the intentions that survive only on their outskirts. There’s an oral and gestural history of the interactions in all these clandestine spheres surrounding the stage, which are one sphere of deconstructed performance practice where life and art...