Here is a report on the 9/11/09 Community Sing in Jackson Heights, Queens, at the Jackson Heights branch of the Queens Library. I wanted to document the event in full detail in case anyone is interested a) in what transpired and/or b) creating a Community Sing in their own milieu.
The event was supposed to be about an hour long, but in lasted an hour and forty-five minutes—until the library’s closing time—because people did not want to stop singing and talking. This was the most profound lesson of the event: how eager people are to hear and be heard, to connect with one another in real time while present in the same physical space, as opposed to virtual/ digital space. I also experienced just how symbiotic the singing activities were with the dialogue they opened: singing together created an * experience *that softened and opened people into dialogue, both about the experience of singing together and about their stories and thoughts about community and their place in the country/ world.
Setting: The basement meeting room at Jackson Heights Library—a fluorescent-lit, carpeted room that lacks ambience but draws a wonderfully diverse crowd. We arranged the chairs in the room in a circle and laid a songbook on each chair. The songbook contained three songs: America the Beautiful, Amazing Grace, and We Shall Overcome (We Shall Overcome included 3 verses in other languages—Spanish, Hindi and Bengali). We set up a table of refreshments in the corner of the room: juice and water, fruit and crackers, cookies and doughnuts.
*Facilitators: *Dr. Richard Harper was the primary facilitator of the event. I wanted to observe Richie in action, see how he managed in his rather magical way to elicit participation. Stephanie Loveless (my classmate from the Bard MFA program, an artist who is community-minded) and I co-facilitated.
*Participants: *There were roughly twenty people present—a diverse crew in terms of age, race/ ethnicity/ religion/ immigration status, ability, sexuality, professions, etc. Present were two elderly Irish women who grew up on a farm and moved to Queens in their twenties; a Pakistani man who was journalist for BBC Urdu news and his two friends; a deaf Asian man; a Spanish (non-English) speaking man; the councilman from our Queens district and his partner; a young Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter; an African-American musician; three couples/ mothers with infant children.
*Introduction: *I began the activity with a brief introduction about the source of inspiration for the project: Sekou Sundiata’s America Project. People were curious: how did you think of doing this, why are you doing this I provided context about some of the activities Sekou conducted (I didn’t get too deep in *the 51st (dream) state *itself, but focused more on the activities he held in various communities). I explained that I wanted, after his passing, to host an ‘igniting’ activity in my own community, particularly since it happened to be such a richly diverse community, and a rich, complex day (9/11).
*Warm-up: *Richie led everyone in a warm-up beginning with the body. He stood up, asked everyone to do the same, and had people shaking their limbs and eventually dancing to a little rhythm as a warm-up. It was a great opener—relaxing, playful. He then had us all intone together, starting with any note we wanted, then singing an ascending siren of notes, followed by a descending one, then an up/ down combo, then one note on different vowels, changing vowel and/or note according to what we heard our neighbors doing. This was a simple way to prepare people for one of the more ‘experimental’ activities we had in store.
*Song *From intoning “oh” on the same note, he led us into singing America the Beautiful. We sang through all four verses, while standing up, and between the warmup and the singing you could feel how the energy in the room had stilled and changed. We sat down after this experience in a moment of silence—one woman began to tear up with the emotion of how beautiful it was to sing with others. We talked a bit about the experience of singing together, then about the song. Richie led a discussion with lead questions including: how many people knew this song already? (Nearly everyone did.) Do you remember the first time you sang it? Did you know all these verses? Singing through it, what verses did you like the best and why? We had a brief discussion about America, the land, the emotion of singing the song on this particular day.
*Song Next we sang Amazing Grace. Beautiful harmonies naturally emerged, people were warm in more ways than one. Richie led the discussion again, first asking about folks’ associations with this song. He then spoke about the origin of the song, since it was penned by a man named John Newton, a former shipmaster of a slave-trade ship who had ‘seen the light.’ This context opened up a discussion about moments of transformation. What were our own moments of transformation? People spoke of reunions with parents, seeing images of the Vietnam War, and about 9/11.
Slow Sing: Stephanie then introduced her activity, called Slow Sing. In this activity, everyone sings a part of a song that they love (in any style, in any language)—as slowly as they can, and all at the same time. The concept is not easy to grasp quickly, so Richie, Stephanie, Marc Cary and I demonstrated the idea. We asked people to think of their song (some people drew a blank and used America the Beautiful or Amazing Grace, since the words were in front of them), and dove in. This segment was perhaps the most beautiful moment of the event. There was a deep moment of silence after we were done singing, and two people commented that it was the closest they had felt to prayer in a long time, and to have felt this way among a group of strangers was very significant. We went around the circle and had different folks say a word about the song they sang, and their experience of this activity. Some chose not to speak but seemed very engaged nonetheless, others said they preferred the experience of listening to everyone else over participating.
*Song *We closed, finally, with the many verses of We Shall Overcome, including the foreign language verses.
*Ending: *We ended with a bit of reflective discussion and eating/ mingling. I spoke about the notion of responsibility—as an artist, I felt a responsibility to take creative action in my own community in the form of this activity. I posed the question: what kinds of actions could others take that matched their own ways of giving?
*My Reflections: *Some of the many things I learned from this Community Sings:
- The creating of a space of meaningful exchange through art is * necessary*. People that were strangers to each other just an hour and a half earlier had become fully human to one another in the course of the event. As Sekou urged, it is part of an artist’s work to create these kinds of public rituals.
- It seems important to create multiple such events in a single community, in this case Jackson Heights, to keep the ball rolling. I’m in the process of imagining what this means for me/ Jackson Heights.
- If one goes outside of one’s local community to ‘tour’ this activity, it is vital to partner with local groups who would then be able to imagine how to build upon the energy created from a single event.
- For me, the creative act of performing is a separate mode from the creative act of creating space for dialogue through art. These modes can inform one another, but connections between participation-based spaces and spectator-based spaces should not be forced.
Samita Sinha Independent Artist Performer in the 51st (dream) state
