Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àse, and the Power of the Present Moment by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones (review)

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones details a fascinating interconnection between Yoruba spirit practices and jazz in theatrical art-making. The blend constitutes a new genre as Jones charts generations of a community of artists who craft a unique form of theater that encompasses mind, spirit, body—the everyday—and the hyper-realities of the stage within ancient practices of African aesthetics. The work uses the expansive characteristics of jazz and Yoruba spiritual concepts to practice personal and social transformation as suggested by Paul Carter Harrison and others’ notion of black theater as ritual practice. Theatrical Jazz provides the biography of an artistic movement committed to principles of acceptance, transformation, and work—a movement in the political sense and yet more like water and smoke pressing its way through the interstices of the American theatrical scene. This form is counterhegemonic in its departure from mainstream American and African American realist and abstract theater.

In graceful prose, Jones shows how late twentieth and early twenty-first century black performers have improvised on the critical, affirming, transformative characteristics of ritual in a distinctive riff. Theatrical Jazz practice turns theater towards personal and communal change through specific methodology and process in Jones’s and her artist collaborators’ work. Jones explicates elements of jazz, Yoruba cosmology, black queer epistemology, and theater in the bountiful oeuvres of foundational practitioners Laurie Carlos, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Sharon Bridgforth. Jones analyzes iconic shows including Carlos’s White Chocolate For My Father, Jones’s The Book of Daniel: jazz rite in lecture format, and Bridgforth’s con flama. These “elders” as master teachers have trained generations of artists to create new work rooted in black jazz, Africanist, and queer approaches to endless charged topics such as identity, sex and sexuality, womanhood, formations of blackness, violence, history, and ecology.

Part research journal and part theoretical genealogy, Theatrical Jazz contemplates how knowledge and art are produced, sourcing both from a similar spring. Through her contemplations of her own scholarly and artistic journey, what she calls “autocritography,” Jones shows how the unique perspective of the scholar-artist illuminates the processes of knowledge in addition to the significances of the research subjects’ work (5). Via auto-ethnographic poetic offerings, Jones’s experiences and responses operate as editorial, as evidence, as commentary, and as embodied theory of personal account, such as that which she demands of the other artists she studies—and the artists demand of themselves in their practice. The commitment and community sensibility of theatrical jazz exists in the forging and writing of Theatrical Jazz as well as in its content, observations, and criticism.

Likewise, in the spirit of “The Bridge / Àse / Transformation,” the artists boldly share their lives as candidly as their art. Both jump off the page with vivid, perilous, and refreshing honesty. This approach allows Jones and the brilliant, sophisticated artists she engages to speak together in the collaborative spirit of the art itself. The genre incorporates techniques that demand connection and contributions from audience members who necessarily become witnesses and accomplices as they participate through presence and play. The book’s composition models this practice, a gift for those who have had the privilege of witnessing one of these electric shows live and those encountering them for the first time on these multi-vocal pages.