The 2012 Callaloo Conference Overview

The theme was LOVE, the weekend, an explosion of intellectual trajectories—atoms collecting and dispersing to form new compounds at the speed of light, the speed of thought.

After the welcome by Princeton University Director of the Center for African American Studies Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Callaloo founder and editor Charles Rowell, the conference programs commenced with a excerpt dance performance from a full-length work entitled On the Block: After Bearden, presented by the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company. The work when originally performed featured renowned visual artist Romare Bearden’s 1971 Harlem street scene, The Block, as the scenic design. In his introductory remarks, the company’s associate artistic director and lead dancer Walter Rutledge explained that it was this magnificent collage that inspired his choreography. The performance featured legendary, premiere dancers Dyane Harvey, Dudley Williams, Sarita Allen, and Mr. Rutledge as two couples in adjoining flats, one in a playful, tactile romance, the other in the throes of abuse and disintegration. Together the two couples mirrored the story of black survival, generating a dramatic tension between oppression and resilience. The evening was a beautiful way to commence a discussion of LOVE.

In my comments as respondent to the performance, I found many concentric circles. Sister love was represented by the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company current Artistic Director Sheila Rohan. In taking over the company, Rohan has taken up the mantle of her sister and company founder, the late Nanette Rohan Bearden, to ensure the company’s legacy and future. Committed love was represented by the dynamically creative couple of Romare and Nanette Bearden. Collaborators in marriage and art, they were partners in and for life. The dancers also conveyed by exquisite form, training, and passion the love of the body, their articulation soothing the battered black psyche and its centuries of memories. In one scene, a couple literally fell into love as they tumbled into and off the bed. Through another window an abused and terrified spouse wrenched toward discovering a love of self. There was a moment in the dance when Diane Harvey, who played the woman, curled herself to the floor to pick up the precious shards of a photograph her man had torn apart. In that movement and moment she embodied the ritual of deconstruction and reconstruction that has been the strength of African people in our struggle to survive and in the search for love. That simple dance gesture was also simultaneously a “reconstruction” of Romare Bearden’s collage technique, echoing his visual genius in movement. The performance thus engendered the very vibrancy of the spiritual love that has sustained us, the backdrop of Bearden’s art, that wonderfully cacophonous Harlem block, a nod to an unwavering love for our people.

One might wonder why a literary conference would begin with a dance performance. For me, the homage was recognition of the intrinsic, interdisciplinary nature of black creative expression and a harbinger of the cross-pollinating dialogue to come.

I can only touch upon some highlights: The extra-terrestrial love as imagined by the brilliant speculative fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor; the post-Dadaist Greg Tate’s take on the eloquence and relevance of Malcolm and Martin in a fractured text, refracted through the mouths of two women in an improvised scat; the pristine, laser prose of Percival Everett, slicing right through the cerebral cortex to operate on the heart; Ethiopian American Haile Gerima’s downhome notes of a native filmmaker; the always oracular Tyehimba Jess.

I had the good fortune to sit on the second evening’s panel, entitled “Love’s Lyricism.” The young composer Courtney Bryan presented two original works of music for discussion. The first selections, entitled “meditation on Romans 8” and “Come Away, My Beloved, meditation on Song of Songs,” were rendered by the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of new and rarely-heard works. “Meditation on Love” was performed by Ms. Bryan on solo piano. Her compositions embraced both the ancient and the modern. Her atonal soprano melody was simultaneously a primal scream and cry of deliverance, wailing in one...