Tourists seek out new places. In a new setting they are forced to see and think without the support of a whole world of known sights, sounds and smells—largely unacknowledged—that give weight to being …”
~Ti Fu Tuan, Space and Place
During the summers of 2007 and 2008, I spent a total of 3 months on the island of Santiago in the Republic of Cape Verde, an archipelago 350 miles off the west coast of Africa. I was there initially to collaborate with a team of teaching artists from both the United States and Cape Verde, and charged with the mission of engaging an eager group of talented young people from both countries in creative process and cultural exchange. A pair of artists, each representing one of the two countries, collaborated in developing a curriculum in their respective artistic disciplines. Together, each pair would mine our cultural traditions for methods/processes/concepts to give students insight into the world beyond their own borders and the universality of the creative impulse of all people. During my first trip, I was paired with Mano Preto, a Cape Verdean dance maker and Artistic Director of Raiz di Polon, a contemporary dance company based in the capital city of Praia. At first I was concerned by the prospect of having traveled all that way to be paired with an artist as heavily influenced by contemporary dance of the West as I had been. Would the intended diversity of perspectives be less rich for our students as a result? I soon understood that Mano lived in an artful suspension between tradition and contemporaneity that was far more relevant than the fossilized Africa I had been guilty of anticipating.
What I had not anticipated was that I would fall so deeply in love with the place. It seemed the history of the modern world converged on these volcanic masses sprinkled in the Atlantic Ocean. Over hundreds of years, its colonization by the Portuguese to serve the early development of the transatlantic slave trade, its racial mix, its devastating cycle of drought, and the impact of prolonged migration had informed every aspect of the country and its people. To be Cape Verdean was to be fundamentally hybridized—racially, musically, kinesthetically, linguistically, historically, socially and politically. And while the people certainly harbored their share of existential crises around the contributing sources of this hybridization, the Cape Verdeans I encountered took a deeply moving pride in their resulting cultural identity. I heard more than one Cape Verdean politician affirm the obvious: Cape Verde is small and after generations of migration, there are more Cape Verdeans living outside Cape Verde than inside it. And while the country has no foothold in manufacturing or agriculture to speak of, its number one export is its people and its culture. By the end of that first visit, I was sure I had spent a month in the center of the universe, a place that, like Mano, stretched tenuously between.
Mano’s artistic work demonstrated both a compelling relationship to place and this balance between. He and his collaborators were engaged in a curious experiment, feeding ravenously on Cape Verde’s traditional dance, music and literary forms only to deconstruct and reconstitute them in an infinite number of ways. Mano and I shared an approach to creative process informed by the contemporary art practices of the West. However, in Mano’s hands, contemporary dance functioned as the neutral vessel he used to frame these experiments around place. Uncovering the moment to moment relevance of those rhythms, movement patterns, or melodies seemed to be the ongoing quest.
So, like a mad cultural scientist, Mano conducts his experiments in Praia, in the studio supplied him by the Cape Verdean government. Neither of the tiny adjacent rooms have windows, so a series of doors are typically open to the street where onlookers stop to watch rehearsal, and on occasion offer choreographic suggestions. At night working class men staggering home from their evening libations thank him for representing Cape Verde to the world. As Raiz di Polon tours regularly throughout Europe, Africa, and South America, Mano does take Cape Verde to the world through his work. And he brings the world back to Cape Verde with him to consume, deconstruct and reconstitute in an ever-evolving stew of rhythms, movement patterns, melodies and structures. Mano hovers between in this way, and I was envious of this interplay of rootedness to place, the courage to leave, and the freedom to return.
I returned the next year to teach alongside Mano again, followed by an additional month to collaborate with him in the creation of a duet for the two of us. During that extended stay, I learned to dance batuko and to sing a morna. I learned to understand criollo but barely to speak a word of it. And in the following year, Mano arrived in Hartford, my small New England city, to join me in completing and performing the resulting duet. Some thought the piece was a not-so-coded expression of a love affair between two people. It was not. Nonetheless, something was stirred in that exchange. As it turns out, I was engaged in a kind of courtship. I was in pursuit of a relationship with place—my place—and Mano served as matchmaker.
Things too close to us can be handled, smelled, and tasted, but they cannot be seen—at least not clearly. Natives are at home, steeped in their place’s ambience, but the instant they think about the place it turns into an object of thought “out there.” Thinking creates distance.”
~Ti Fu Yuan, Space and Place
Experiencing a new place often alters one’s perspective on home. And while this has been true for me each time I’ve traveled or taken up residence in a new city, my journeys to Cape Verde made me hyperaware of how place can shape an artist’s voice. Before this experience, I had not felt particularly American. In fact, as the child of Jamaican immigrants, I did not feel I could lay claim to either Jamaica or America. However, as I negotiated day to day social contracts in Cape Verde, I could not deny that I was undoubtedly a product of a particular time and place. My gracious hosts were patient with my quirks as I favored an imbalanced ratio of work to play, a relatively fixed interpretation of time, and more highly defined physical boundaries. They suspended judgment when I neglected to stop for extended greetings with every acquaintance I encountered on the road, and soon I learned to make social engagement a priority over the determination to arrive at my destination on time. In these mundane exchanges I came to appreciate the values of the people and the place. And as I encountered more and more of Cape Verde’s cultural products, I began to see the threads of deep social engagement, the fluidity of time, the porous nature of personal space, and a poetic commitment to nostalgia running through the work to give it its distinct cadence and tone. And I could see these influences playing out in quite divergent works. One Cape Verdean scholar described it as cultural DNA, and it made me wonder how something of my own place existed as seeds taking root and flowering in the art of its people.
It is important to note that I am not setting out to curate a season of Cape Verdean art. In fact, it is unlikely that Cape Verde will specifically influence any of the work I will present. So why spend so much time detailing that place and its people? I guess I am struck by the fact that a place can leave an impression, and I wonder how. There’s something about the way the history of a place make itself apparent now. There’s also something about the way people relate to their place, and how they relate in their place, and how the values of the place’s people manifest in the way they express themselves in the world. And ultimately it makes me think of home. What of home lives in us, and in what ways do we make our place apparent in our forms of expression?
Intimate occasions are often those on which we become passive and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, exposed to the caress or sting of new experience. … Intimate places are places of nurture where our fundamental needs are heeded and cared for without fuss …
Home is an intimate place. … Hometown is an intimate place.”
~Ti Fu Yuan, Space and Place
For me, home is Hartford. So when someone recently asked me what I loved about Hartford, the answer came quickly. I love the invisible things about Hartford. I love the buried Park River that flows beneath the city, persistent in its effort to connect Hartford to its estranged surrounding suburbs. Now that I know the river is there, I find it difficult to drive down any street without imagining where it flows and how this invisible force once shaped the cityscape I now know. I love that beef patties and coco bread have become a staple in the city’s public school cafeterias, and that patois is a language most of the city’s children easily recognize because of the dense Jamaican population. I love the memory of tobacco farms just outside Hartford where the promise of seasonal employment motivated so many Jamaicans to immigrate here during World War II and the years that followed. I love the Albany Avenue of my childhood where my dad and I would visit family friends. In this Little Jamaica, worlds collided in homes filled with the smell of oxtail stew with butterbeans cooking on the stove. I love Downtown Hartford with its sweet, barely there skyline, and the small patch of brownstones that survived progress. I love the memory of old school department stores like G. Fox and Sage Allen where the architecture was as compelling as the merchandise. I love the arches of Bushnell Park and the roses in mandala-patterns in Elizabeth Park. I love the oh-so-hip pride of the West End and the industrial buildings all across the city that house every kind of artful endeavor, whether we can afford to occupy them or not. I love that the stodgy insurance capital is not so stodgy, but feels compelled to keep up appearances for the benefit of outsiders. The reality is that much of stodgy Hartford exited the city proper a long time ago. I love that, even as the mansions of Scarborough Street loom teasingly over our shoulders, working class people fight daily to make a life here. I love that Hartford is now home to people of every color, speaking so many languages, and sharing so many cuisines it is hard to believe there was ever a time before white flight. I love that Hartford feels like the country to New Yorkers, and that we’re just a short, scenic ride from real New England covered-bridge-boonies. Hartford is a city hovering tenuously between two of the nation’s thriving metropolises, and nestled among bucolic landscapes.
I must be honest in saying, I don’t love everything, and even the things I love are sometimes born of a determination to swim against the tide. But something invisible about the city tickles me on a regular basis: a small building from another time … or discovering streets, historical figures and events that undo all my assumptions about the place. This spirit was aptly captured in Mel Chin’s public art work, Ghost, commissioned by Real Art Ways in 1991. Ghost hinted at the façade of Hartford’s first black church in the exact place it was built on Talcott Street more than a century earlier, but where it had not stood for nearly 50 years. In Chin’s work that sacred ground, now an office building, was merely indicated with a wood frame, mesh, chalk outline, and stone steps. This, I think, is the idea. Place has memory, and in indulging that memory from time to time, we reaffirm our relationship to that place. Art is particularly adept at giving those ethereal memories form, and bringing forth questions about how those memories are embodied. History doesn’t live entirely in the past; it absolutely frames the present and informs what we become.
