A commons is a bustling, populous place: a space where a community convenes to celebrate, share resources, and deliberate and act on common concerns.
At first glance, the census only stands at six for The Commons: Southern Futures, a three-day festival of performances and workshops this weekend that culminates a two-week residency at UNC-Chapel Hill’s CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio. A cohort of local Black artists, including poets Cortland Gilliam and CJ Suitt, spoken word artist and musician Johnny Lee Chapman III, choreographers Jasmine Powell and Anthony “Otto” Nelson Jr., and playwright and composer Sylvester Allen Jr., have collaborated to curate and present new works.
Set the aperture wider, though, and the space begins to fill, with collaborating dance and visual artists, stage designers, and technicians. There’s also the supporting infrastructure of Carolina Performing Arts and Culture Mill, the Saxapahaw-based performing arts laboratory now celebrating its 10th season, which designed the Commons festival to strengthen the local arts ecosystem by facilitating partnerships between Black artists and funding organizations, scholars, businesses, and communities.
Zoom out farther and the neighbors and the kids come in: after the festival’s principals conduct interactive creative workshops Sunday morning at historic Hargraves Community Center in Chapel Hill’s Northside district, muralists and graffiti artists will teach their crafts alongside art vendors, just beyond the food trucks at a Hargraves Park block party.
Now, adjust your vision to include the people the six artists will bring forth in their works this weekend:
Forty-two uncles, aunts, and cousins, members of an extended “ride or die” family who’ve banded together to buy the plantation land where their ancestors once worked—and keep in the family a house where some of their spirits dwell, in Powell’s dance theater work Self En Titled.
A delegate to Virginia’s constitutional convention, the first Black lawman in Alamance County, and the leader of a Black militia regiment in South Carolina—all destined to be murdered by white supremacists—who share a night of rare hospitality in the 1800s, in Allen’s drama The First and Final Meeting of Jim, Joe and Wyatt.
A military kid who doesn’t find his Southern roots until he spends a decade in Chapel Hill, first as an undergraduate and now as a doctoral candidate, in Gilliam’s poetry cycle Wooden Nickels.
A poet whose belief in Sankofa—the Ghanaian precept of retrieving the good from the past to make the present whole—takes a deeper meaning after the recent deaths of his mother and a favorite aunt, in Chapel Hill poet laureate Suitt’s 3731.
A dancer who curates his lived experiences in a queer Black body by interrogating the notion of authenticity within the ballroom culture concept of “realness”—flawless portrayals of human forms and social roles that dancers cannot otherwise access for themselves—in Nelson’s Self Untitled.
And a songwriter whose fantastic, metaphorical autobiography as a merman twists toward horror as he probes the dark backstory of their relationships with mariners and those who walk dry land during the dawn of modern medicine in Chapman’s Ballad of the Black Pearl.
Throughout all this, the South pours into these performances that mix flights of the fantastical with creative nonfiction and documentary work.
Audiences will encounter these works and their creators over the weekend in daytime and evening panels, workshops, and festival celebrations. Venues include Northside District and Andrea Reusing’s Garden Spot. All tickets for the festival are pay-as-you-can, with a suggested $20 price for single-day tickets and $30 for an all-access pass.
“A lot of my creative intention was like, ‘How do we make this town actually more intimate?’” says Gilliam, a poet, community organizer, and doctoral candidate at UNC’s School of Education. “How do we build intimacy by way of invitation and collective conversation?”
Still, much of Gilliam’s early work with the festival won’t appear onstage.
“Coming to the festival, I was thinking I know all these people in these different silos of work around Chapel Hill and the South,” he says. But the politics in bridging what he terms long-term “relational fissures” between the university and the town are tricky. “I wanted to invite very particular people who don’t often speak to one another, often for good reason. I think there’s a power in invitation.”
Previously, Gilliam curated Black Out Loud, a 2019 collaborative art exhibition and film in conjunction with the Center for the Study of the American South.
“It was a collaborative effort to just express, personally, what it means to be Black in this town, in this area, in a historically white institution in the South,” Gilliam says, noting that the project was “trying to highlight the heterogeneity of Blackness.”
Being a curator in the Commons, he says, is a continuation of that work: “making introductions between people that can hopefully have a life of their own afterward, creating a critical mass of Black creative individuals and creative thoughts, which is so deeply relational.”
“It’s this hodgepodge, this gumbo of a collection of artists individually finding their voices and then working collectively together and including each other in the recipe,” says Allen, a multidisciplinary artist and activist who narrated Sound of Judgment, an Emmy Award-winning documentary produced by ProPublica and The News & Observer.
After preliminary meetings earlier in the year and a weeklong retreat last month, the sextet has worked together at the CURRENT studios over the last two weeks, in a residency providing them stage time and access to production resources. For Chapman, his first experience with the Commons in 2020 was a golden opportunity to challenge himself as an artist: “Now I have access to space, resources, and a production team; what am I capable of manifesting and creating from my ideas?” The answer was his 30-minute video Southern (Dis)Comfort.
“What happens when you give us the budget and give us the team?” Chapman asks. “Give me what I’m worth, and I will give you something that will blow your mind!”
During the two-week residency, the principals found themselves turning to one another, not just for feedback but to collaborate and contribute to one another’s work. Gilliam asked Chapman to add a musical bed under a poem he was reading; Powell asked the rest of the cohort to read the narration for her dance work Self Un/En-titled.
“I needed all of them,” she says. “They’re Black male voices, and my story is about a Black male, my great-grandfather. They enter the stage even before I do!”
“Just being in each other’s presence can modify your piece in ways that you didn’t even initially envision,” Chapman notes. “Then you’re like, ‘Well, what else can I do?’”
“It’s like one person’s energy comes in and sends a wave through the process,” Suitt says. “Sort of like murmuration, the way birds fly in these undulating patterns in the sky—you can see them all just respond and move with one another.”
In a culture that has devoted considerable effort to suppressing entire portions of Black history, curation, it turns out, is the opposite of erasure. After the facts of human lives in communities have either been carelessly forgotten, deliberately ignored, or in some cases actively deleted, the work involved in looking and listening for—and then gathering, documenting, preserving, and presenting—those stories to the public is an act of resistance.
“It’s a way of opening up the community to consider stories as a way of recognition,” Powell says. “The actual story is the recognition of human beings, of people in the Black community.”
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