Living & Arts

Kitchen Table Revisited

Kitchen-table-revisited

Jake Mrozewski | Phoenix Staff

In print | October 8, 2009

Last weekend, Swarthmore was host to not one but five powerhouses in the world of spoken word — Liza Garza, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, D’lo, Mayda del Valle and Ursula Rucker. The occasion was “Kitchen Table Revisited,” a part of the Cooper Series sponsored by the Intercultural Center and the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, and named in honor of the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first publishing company run by women of color to promote writing by women of color.
The Kitchen Table Press was started in 1980 by a group of notable activist and feminist writers of the time, spearheaded by author Barbara Smith, but also co-founded by playwright Cherrie Moraga and poet Audre Lourde among others.

Nearly 30 years later, the writings of a new generation of women of color take the form not of print, but of performance.

Throughout the weekend’s series of events — from a panel on Friday, Oct. 2 to a master class on Saturday, Oct. 3, where the artists talked about their creative process and took students through free form workshops, to the final concert on Saturday night — attendees saw that the five artists represented the large diversity that the movement of spoken word encompasses.

The concert featured everything from slam poetry pieces to hip-hop with musical accompaniment by Rucker to D’lo’s act resembling standup comedy, where he played his mother with lines like “I can’t imagine what could have made her a gay” and “I tell we should have never left Sri Lanka.”
The fluidity of spoken word can be attributed to the relatively young movement’s origins, when Marc Smith started the very first poetry slam in Chicago in 1984. A few of the artists were able to speak briefly about their craft before the concert, and Tsai, a Chicago native, described the first poetry slams as “a whole bunch of different convergences of different things happening, like hip-hop happening, poetry slam happening, even the kind of spoken word coming from punk rock — all of those things.”

Spoken word gained more mainstream attention in the late ’90s and early 2000s when the film “Slam” and the documentary “SlamNation” earned accolades in independent film festivals in 1998, and later when Russell Simons produced the HBO show Def Poetry in 2002. Several of the artists have connections to the groundbreaking show, including Tsai, Garza and del Valle, another Chicago native, who was an original cast member of the show’s Tony Award-winning Broadway iteration.
Bringing spoken word to mainstream awareness may have led the movement to lose some of its leftist, activists roots. Del Valle said, “I think that poetry pre- and post- Def Poetry Jam on HBO has, for me, shifted dramatically, in content, in style, in the amount of people who were doing it and in the reason people were doing it. I think after Def Poetry there were a lot of people who were trying to get on TV, whereas before that was not the case. Up until then, people had just done it for the love, and there really was no other outlet for it, so it’s changed.”

The struggle between the spotlight and the art was precisely the focus of one of pieces del Valle performed, “The Gift.” Dedicated to her fellow cast members in the Broadway production of Def Poetry, the piece was a stirring wake-up call to self, urging del Valle not to grow complacent as an artist, with lines like, “This is not a job or an occupation, it’s a vocation, a calling” and “I won’t get where I want to, if I don’t know where I’m from.”

Among the issues brought up at the panel was how the Internet has been a boon and a nuisance to the artists’ crafts in recent years. With websites like YouTube, spoken word artists have been able to reach new audiences and fans, but also have had to deal with swarms of anonymous hateful and bigoted comments.

Technology even found its way into one of the songs by Rucker, the Philly-based artist who worked with The Roots in their 1994 album and performed at Swarthmore last semester in the Spring Poetry Festival. The piece, appropriately named “Tron” had Rucker lamenting “how machines move forward while people stand still” and asking, “Can we find that balance between machinery and humanity?”
Rucker performed with her longtime band that brought a metal edge to “Tron” and allowed Rucker to experiment with the cadence of her words in her many songs. Other artists also brought the band to the stage in their acts, allowing them to try out musical accompaniment to their pieces for the first time. Del Valle used the band to sing a prologue to the piece that she performed at the White House for President Obama’s inauguration, which was “for grandmothers” and “everyone who came before us.” Garza also employed the band for songs urging the audience to “dream on. Hold on to your dreams, child.”

Like in Tsai’s equally playful and purposeful piece “Self Centered,” which imagined a world where, rather than being the Other, Tsai was “the center … of everything,” the “Kitchen Table Revisited” series brought these five all-star artists and their life stories to center stage.