The night was thickly humid, and the Chopin Theater wasn’t air-conditioned. But no one seemed to mind as Nikki Giovanni made her joyful way through “Ego-tripping,” a sort of poetic tall tale about the black woman.
“I was born in the congo/I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx . . .,” Giovanni began.
Many of the 250 audience members were black. But many others weren’t. As with most events sponsored by the aggressively cross-cultural Guild Complex, the crowd last Wednesday was as diverse as diverse can be — racially, ethnically, economically. There were dozens of teens as well as men and women into their 60s and 70s.
And everyone was leaning forward, at least a bit, watching and listening as, midway through the poem, the tiny, wide-eyed Giovanni, an icon from the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, read:
“. . . On a trip north/I caught a cold and blew/My nose giving oil to the arab world/I am so hip even my errors are correct. . . .”
This brought happy whoops from the crowd, and laughter, and scattered applause. It was clear that many knew this poem, had read it before, had even recited it.
“. . . I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal/I cannot be comprehended/except by my permission,” Giovanni read triumphantly. And then, as she moved, with a more regal pace, into the final lines of the poem, she was joined by some and then by many in the audience until the room was fairly shouting the final words:
“I mean/I/can fly/like a bird in the sky.”
On many levels, the Giovanni reading last week was a quintessential Guild Complex event. For one thing, it wasn’t just a showcase for the 58-year-old, internationally renowned poet.
Performing with her was a young Chicago writer, Kim Ransom, author of a 1999 self-published book of poems, “The Black House,” and two groups affiliated with the annual DanceAfrica concerts, scheduled this year for Oct. 26-28.
“You hear of the greats from history: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni,” Ransom said in an interview before the performance. “For me to be able to reach out and touch [Giovanni] and be in the same circle with her — I’m becoming part of the history I’ve cherished so much.”
Blending of different artists
Linking new writers with established stars has been a staple of the Guild Complex since its inception in 1989. So has the idea of bringing together writers with musicians and dancers for joint performances, and of combining, on the same program, artists from different cultural milieus.
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One night in June, for example, Sri Lankan-born novelist Michael Ondaatje (“The English Patient”), long a Canadian resident, shared the stage with country music star Steve Earle, who was reading from his recently published book of short stories, and Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago poet, artist and actor.
The idea behind the Guild Complex is a cross-pollination of cultures and art forms. Go to any of the 100-plus events that the organization sponsors each year, said poet Michael Warr, the group’s executive director for its first 10 years, and “you know there’s a newness about what’s going to happen that night. You’re going to hear something you may not have heard before.”
And a key element to the Guild Complex approach is collaboration, said Julie Parson-Nesbitt, the current executive director, herself a poet. “This is, by far, the most social place you could find,” she said. “It demystifies the image of the artist sitting alone. I love breaking that stereotype.”
The emphasis is on community, rather than the individual.
Council of Elders
So, as Giovanni sat in the audience last week, the evening’s performance began with a procession of the Council of Elders, led by Chuck Davis, artistic director of DanceAfrica, a co-sponsor of the evening’s performances, and accompanied by two drummers and a candle-bearer.
An oversize man with a booming voice, Davis danced at the head of the column, graceful in his African robes, and colorful too. Following behind, nearly a dozen other elders — community leaders from fields such as business, education and the arts — walked straight-backed. On stage, the group blessed the performers and the audience, and then took places of honor in the front row.
Then came a joint performance by Ransom and Urban Credo, a troupe of 12 college and high school students, formed in 1997 through Columbia College Chicago, and it began with a glitch — some microphone problems.
The Guild Complex has never been a slick, well-oiled cultural machine. Its new offices at 1212 N. Ashland Ave. are filled with secondhand shelves, desks and chairs. The Chopin Theater, across the street at 1543 W. Division St., where most of the organization’s events are held, is another bare-bones operation, featuring a lobby decorated with used living room furniture circa 1965.
So audiences and artists are used to less-than-deluxe conditions. Ransom handled the balky mike with aplomb and soon had it working as she read her adaptation of “Song of Lowino,” a poem by Ugandan writer Okot p’Bitek about an African woman’s distress at her husband’s lust for the white world.
Dance interpretation
As she spoke, the Urban Credo dancers performed their own interpretation of the words — a strenuously athletic mix of African and American steps, choreographed by Boogie McClarin of the Hip-Hop/House Collective.
And then it was time for Giovanni.
“Art is a big stew,” Giovanni said in an interview. “Any time you add to that mix, the stew improves. The Guild does that extremely well.”
The Guild Complex grew out of Guild Books, a noted independent bookstore in the Lincoln Park neighborhood that was established in the 1960s and, throughout its three decades in operation, embodied the cross-cultural and countercultural ideals of that era.
“There needed to be a place where poets and writers from all over the city and suburbs, of different writing styles and different ethnic and racial backgrounds, could come together,” recalled Parson-Nesbitt, a volunteer clerk at the store before it closed in May 1993. “It was carrying everybody’s books. It was a fun, exciting scene.”
Like the bookstore, Guild Complex is rooted in a belief that the arts can make a difference — can bring about social change.
“Guild Complex sees art as a means of transforming society — through the linking of people but also through giving people a voice,” Warr said. “The Complex has been a conduit for many voices.”
And those voices aren’t always in tune.
Making an impact
Warr noted that, at a Gwendolyn Brooks-sponsored poetry competition at the Complex several years ago, one pro-life poet unsettled a large segment of the generally left-leaning audience with his reading. “He had a booming voice, and he sounded like the voice of God, and he read this diatribe against abortion,” Warr recalled. Nonetheless, despite the discomfort of many audience members, the poem was an award-winner.
And, in their performances last Wednesday, Ransom and Giovanni pulled no punches either.
The Ugandan poem that Ransom read was a critique of the white world and the way it overpowers other cultures. Among its lines were the following: “My husband says/He rejects me/Because I do not appreciate/White men’s foods,/And that I do not know/How to hold/The spoon and the fork.”
Tribute to Tupac
In her part of the evening, Giovanni presented a poem praising assassinated rapper Tupac Shakur and asserting, “If those who lived by the sword died by the sword,/there would be no white men on the earth.”
At another point, she read a work that stressed the inability or unwillingness of white society to comprehend the African-American community. It ended: “and I really hope no white person ever has cause/to write about me/because they never understand/Black love is Black wealth and they’ll/probably talk about my hard childhood/and never understand that/all the while I was quite happy.”
Such hard-edged words are at the heart of the Guild Complex’s mission. The idea isn’t to produce an art that is comfortable, but one that is challenging.
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“It’s not about being in agreement,” Warr said. “It’s about being open to different ideas.”
And that was the message that Chuck Davis delivered at the end of Wednesday’s performance — a message about the mixing of cultures and viewpoints, and the respect that that requires.
“It’s about coming together,” Davis told the audience and performers. “We must always take the time to see things 360 degrees.”