Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth's love conjure/blues

When we first get a glimpse inside the juke joint in Sharon Bridgforth's love conjure/blues (2004), we see the singer "sway step smile sway step smile" (10) onto the floor of bettye's, "the best blues inn in the country" (8). The narrator describes the scene:

sway sway she went till she in place standing centerinside a moment of stillness. Then suddenly/the threeof them hit a noteall at the same time/aaaaaaawwwwwwhhhhhh went the sound and i declare some kind of hunger-spirit swept through the room.took everybody's mind in one swoop.after thatwasn't nothing but bodies feeding the feeing tillsunday sunrise just before the first service.

(10)

As the lineation, syntax, typography, punctuation, and onomatopoeia here suggest, love conjure/blues is performance literature that simultaneously offers a heightened textual experience for the reader. Termed a "performance novel" in the introduction to the Redbone Press edition and a "text installation" in its performance iteration, Bridgforth's work has been praised by performance scholars and practitioners, including E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Jill Dolan, and Barak adé Soleil. Yet Bridgforth's textuality does its own performance work on the page. More than the modifier "suddenly," the slashes perform the suddenness, the simultaneity of this "all at the same time" sound as the smash of the onomatopoeic " aaaaaaawwwwwwhhhhhh" explodes from the trio, scoring the sound of voice, guitar, and piano in a "swoop" of consonants and vowels. As the text transfers the sound and motion of the singer's "sway sway" and of "bodies feeding the feeling," Bridgforth's compositional strategies twine literature, orature, and bodily experience tightly together.

Most discussions of Bridgforth link her work to the theatrical jazz aesthetic through its genealogical relation to theater artists such as Ntozake Shange, an early influence, and Robbie McCauley and Laurie Carlos, with whom she has collaborated, and through its formal features and its developmental process. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of the first book-length study of the jazz aesthetic, characterizes this performance tradition as a hybrid text/movement genre that "uses gestural language as counterpoint to the verbal text" ("Cast" 599). O. Jones and Bridgforth write:

We use the term theatrical jazz to identify a wide range of performance experiences that have common impulses, which include "the break"—or the moment of improvisation and invention—as well as nonlinear narrative strategies, a fluidity of time and place, a nonmimetic gestural vocabulary, and a spiritual vitality that is variously expressed across performances.

("Black" 138–39).

In Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project (2010) , which Bridgforth coedited, O. Jones writes, "Jazz aesthetics rely on the ability to imagine more than one event, sound, or idea at a time. … The work valorizes multiplicity rather than singularity. The work encourages layering of images, ideas, sound, experience. Polyphony and multivocality are mandatory" ("Making" 6). Love conjure/blues affirms these multiple literacies, building on queer, trans, African American, Yoruba, jazz, and southern histories and incorporating collaborative, embodied performance strategies and performative textuality.

Bridgforth's counterintuitive interest in and commitment to textuality within a performance genre explicitly underlines these values: in this work, we see the values of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, of invention and multiplicity, borne out by its groundedness in text and performance at once, in textual and embodied language together. Published as a performance novel in 2004, performed as a text installation from 2004 through 2009 in various configurations with varying numbers of actors, produced in film versions twice, and published again in 2016 (in a revised version) as a performance script in the anthology Blacktino Queer Performance, the mobility of the work shows Bridgforth's commitment to iterative process and multiple forms. ¹ Furthermore, actual text circulates through the performance versions in ways that are themselves layered: Matt Richardson notes that written text frequently appears onscreen during performance; it is "layered throughout the performance" and "is still central" (75). ² Text is centered in other ways...