 ‘409 Edgecombe Avenue’: The director’s experience
Akiba Abaka
In 2004, I was introduced to a writer named Katherine Butler Jones who had written a play centered on the building in Harlem where she lived from birth until she married her husband and moved to Boston at the age of 21. The vibrancy of the building and the people who lived there had shaped and inspired her so much that she felt compelled to immortalize it in a play. The resulting production, “409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill,” felt meaningful from the first line I read, and I was eager to tell her story.
This play was simply about people who took pride in their work, their community and their accomplishments in spite of an oppressive culture that viewed them as second rate. During one of our play development sessions, Mrs. Jones introduced me to Madame Stephanie St. Clair, Harlem’s “Queen of Policy.”
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Exile a common
thread for struggling African artists
Donna Bryson
LONDON — It’s a story of frail hopes pitted against harrowing dangers.
When West African composer Ze Manel collaborated on an opera about desperate African youth seeking better lives in the West, he was telling the story of many African artists.
Some, like Manel, who is from Guinea-Bissau, leave because dictatorships and war stifle creative life. Others are pushed out because paintings and sculptures are luxuries many Africans can’t afford.
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