Role of the Writer
If you look in the comment section of the London post you'll see a fascinating (I think) discussion about the role of the writer in relation to his or her audience. The conversation starts off kind of bumpy, but it quickly evolves into an exchange of ideas.Part of the discussion is around my refusal to explain different parts of my writing. I'm happy to talk about my work in general (my intentions, influences), I'm happy to talk about reading and literary criticism, but I don't feel I should explain metaphors, plot points, and other specifics.
But another part of the dialogue is about the role of an artist as a salesman. The artists responsibility to charm.
To be honest, I don't know what to think. If you have some ideas, please take them to the discussion board so we can do this right.
GOT TO THE DISCUSSION BOARD
Labels: Writing Life
6 Comments:
The role of the artist is to challenge existing forms, and give voice and shape to the images, questions, oppressions, traumas and triumphs which haunt them. And to do this with the utmost integrity. The artist is not to pander to any one. Artists are not here to please, they are here to capture and create.
Artists must have the highest ideals. We have almost completely traded depth for mindless entertainment. We need to create more work with dimension, and nuance. We must take risks creatively. For me, this is both exciting and frightening, but absolutely necessary.
The role of the artist in society is to revolutionize the mind. The world will change if we trust our own minds, question relentlessly, and challenge how we use our imaginations.
That being said, the role of a salesman is to sell books. Artists aren't salesman. They can be, but we must conserve energy for what we do well. The current culture seems to encourage writers to do readings and to become popular, visible people and it helps if you are attractive (which I always hear said about Zadie Smith) which perpetuate racism, exotification and sexism. She is talented and imaginative. Her work should be judged by its own merit.
If I chose not to read a book because its author was racist, sexist or unnatractive, I would be illiterate.
It is of course the writer's choice to become a more visible and accessible person but they do not in any way have an obligation to their readers other than to tell the truth and keep on telling it. Will that hurt book sales? Maybe, maybe not.
I just think that the two things are separate. Write honestly and if you need to do book readings, do book readings but establish boundaries and never let anyone's opinion of you, personally keep you from expressing yourself. The world is far more better for it.
The system of Capitalism (or the abuse of it) is what has confused us profoundly. It has changed dynamic, creative and sensible people into hustlers and helped continue the legacy of slavery by harming our free thinking. This is dehumanizing and demoralizing and oppressive to all people and in this case, artists. That is why I repect the decision Dave Chappelle made to walk away from so much money. He is certainly an artist and he chose integrity over profit. More and more of us need to come together and do the same.
I completely trust our minds to come up with the most creative solutions to bridging the gap between artists (creating in isolation) and visibility.
Luz Cannon
First let me start by acknowledging that I'm simply a reader. But in my limited readings I've seen excellent writers take very different positions on this topic. The historical record reveals that Shakespeare was very conscious of courting commercial success and profit seems to have played a partial but significant role in his career. James Joyce described the artist's duty be to be true to himself by reaching for the unattainable, much like the mythic figure of Icarus hence the name of his protagonist, Dedalus. Richard Wright on the other hand saw his writing as advancing a movement. Contrarily, Ralph Ellison viewed his work as an act of supreme individualism. Maybe great artists are like exhaled air and can't be contained in one form?
I'd rather talk here, Mat, than at the discussion board. I like the idea of remaining anonymous.
I think it's the glamorous responsibility of being a part of the niggerati elite that allows for writers to come as they are, proud and vulnerable, understanding that being black is not a cookie-cutter box of conformity.
Message boards require identity, makes the anonymous naked to everyone else.
Does this make sense or does it go against the grain of my previous argument that writers are dressed-down marketers forced to decorate their canvases with the b.s. of forced interaction?
Mat, check this out. In the theatre community, there is a debate about whether Tyler Perry's work is considered theatre or not. Check it out at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=KIWM6XSn17Y
Here's an article connected to the
above posting:
Black Playwrights Decry ‘Chitlin Circuit’ Label While Keeping Audiences, Actors Satisfied
March 12, 2007
By William Douglas, Special to BlackAmericaWeb.com
photo-Actor Morris Chestnut
You can call David E. Talbert’s latest production, “Love in the Nick of Tyme,” an urban play or a gospel play. Just don’t call it a “chitlin circuit” show.
“What is the chitlin circuit? I don’t do ‘these plays’ or chitlin circuit,” Talbert, an NAACP-award-winning playwright and producer, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “My plays are theater, they’re stories. I wouldn’t classify my plays any differently than August Wilson’s plays are classified. My primary focus is to entertain, uplift and inspire those people who look like those people on stage.”
With themes rooted in religious faith and contemporary storylines that rival the juiciest soap operas, black playwrights and producers like Talbert and Tyler Perry are packing them in at playhouses across the country and raking in millions of dollars from their works.
Hollywood has taken notice of the success of shows like Talbert’s “The Fabric of a Man” and “Lawd Ha’ Mercy,” and Perry’s “Dairy of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea Goes to Jail” -- and is looking to get in on the act.
Lions Gate Films struck a multi-picture deal with Perry that has been pure gold for the company. Perry’s screen adaptation of “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion,” made on shoestring budgets by Hollywood standards, have brought in more than $100 million in two years, industry analysts say. They will make even more money on DVD sales. “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” sold 2.4 million units in the first week of its DVD release in 2005.
“We’ve got Tyler Perry fever,” Michael Paseornek, Lions Gate’s production head, told Salon.com in February 2006. “As far as we’re concerned, the last weekend of February belongs to Tyler Perry, and we plan to be there every year.”
Lions Gate released “Daddy’s Little Girls,” Perry’s third film, last month on Valentine’s Day. The film raked in more than $18 million since it opened.
The take is less than Perry’s previous movies, which some industry analysts attribute to the absence of Perry or his matronly alter ego Madea from the film. Despite brickbats from movie critics, the movie is scoring well with women and people in all age groups, especially in the 25 to 34 range, The Hollywood Reporter.com reported last week.
“Tyler Perry’s movies are primarily selling out to African-American audiences,” Talbert said. “It’s the same audience that’s going to the theater that's selling out the movies. What it’s saying is the black audience is gravitating toward story lines that they can relate to, that they can identify with, that are real to them.”
Both men have also taken their act to the small screen. The success of Talbert’s plays -- which he estimates have grossed over $75 million -- led him to write and co-produce Jamie Foxx’s NBC special, “Unpredictable: A Musical Journey.” Perry is producing “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” a half-hour syndicated sitcom about a multi-generational black family living under one roof.
However, neither man has abandoned the stage. “Love in the Nick of Tyme,” Talbert’s 12th play, is currently touring and features the stage debut of film heartthrob Morris Chestnut, of “Boyz N’ the Hood” fame, who plays an unfaithful father.
Perry’s new show, “What’s Done in the Dark,” is also crisscrossing the country. It’s a rollicking multi-layered story of infidelity and inspiration set in a two-story medical center.
The shows are tinged with morality, music, comedy and drama and are playing to full houses of folks who are looking to be entertained and spiritually uplifted at the same time, according to Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal. Going to the shows can feel like going to church, with audience members shouting “Amen” or “Go ahead, now” to the characters on stage, he says.
“The money the plays and movies are making speaks to the spending power of the black Bible Belt -- a metaphor for the new generation of middle class, black church goers who support mega-churches and telepreachers like T.D. Jakes,” Neal, an associate professor of black popular culture, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Hollywood and Madison Avenue is discovering this.”
Traveling black stage productions aren’t new. Their roots go back to the Jim Crow era when most blacks weren’t allowed in big-city theaters, and black actors could not perform with whites.
To fill the void, plays were produced to appeal to black audiences -- mixing song, dance and message -- and taken on the road. The genre morphed in the 1970s and 1980s with an infusion of gospel found in shows like Vy Higginsen’s “Mama, I Want to Sing.”
The success of “Mama’ and shows like Shelly Garrett’s “Beauty Shop” inspired a new synergistic generation of playwrights/producers/performers like Talbert and Perry, who also found their creative inspiration in the black church.
“I’m a third-generation baby of a preacher. There’s not better place to learn about the impact of love and inspiration and music than in a black church,” Talbert told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “From there, I understood the whole call and response, this whole interactive kind of theater that we do. But in actuality, this was the same thing William Shakespeare was doing when he got started.”
However, some theatrical purists -- black and white -- dismiss the plays as lowbrow “chitlin circuit” productions with over-the-top, overly simplistic, stereotypical portrayal of black characters.
“It’s buffoonish,” Larry Leon Hamlin, producer and artistic director of the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, N.C., told the Detroit News in 2005. “It almost takes us back to Amos and Andy, and we don’t really need that. It’s a degradation of the images of black people.”
The late August Wilson, the black playwright who won Pulitzer Prizes for “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” lamented that the “chitlin circuit” could fill theaters across the country with blacks but blacks, for the most part, didn’t attend the theater.
“You know, I hear what people are saying and I understand it, and I'm a huge fan of August Wilson and wonderful people -- Lorraine Hansberry -- who've written incredible plays,” Perry told National Public Radio’s Michel Martin last April. “The important thing for me is, and what I'd like people to know is that, one particular genre does not make it whole. There are many, many different genres, and if you ever gave it an opportunity open mindedly, I think you'd find some pretty interesting things there.”
Talbert says there’s little that separates his shows from top-shelf Broadway productions.
“The only difference is I choose to tour my plays across the country and allow urban audiences that we target to come in and patronize them,” said Talbert, a Morgan State University graduate, “whereas the plays that are presented on Broadway are performed on Broadway, and economically, they make it difficult for the urban audience to come there to attend. I price my tickets so that my audience can see it. I bring the theater to the people, as opposed to making the people then come to the theater.”
Talbert says the traveling black plays do something else that the major Broadway shows don’t: Hire black actors. Over the years, the shows have provided steady gigs to actors on their way up, on their way down, or for performers looking to try something new.
Television stars like Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons,” Lawrence Hilton Jacobs from “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and movie icons like Billy Dee Williams and Richard Roundtree have all worked in black stage shows. Musical artists like Brian McKnight, Morris Day, Ginuwine, Kirk Franklin and the late Gerald Lavert all got their theatrical chops on the black stage.
“Unless you want to play a kangaroo in 'The Lion King,' then you can be a black actor working, or, if occasionally, there’s a wonderful production like 'The Color Purple,' but they are few and far between,” Talbert said. “Black actors don’t work on Broadway.”
For Chestnut, joining the cast of “Love in the Nick of Tyme” offered a change of pace from the sexy leading man movie roles and an opportunity to recharge his batteries.
“I’d gotten into somewhat of a rut. I’ve done a lot of projects in similar type themes and playing the same type of characters,” he told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “I wanted to get excited about the art of acting again, and this does that for me. Approaching theater -- something I’ve never done -- hones your skills, and you’re in front of a live audience and can’t make mistakes. All those elements combine to excite me. It’s a feeling I haven’t had in years.”
Chestnut politely sidestepped questions about critical complaints about the black shows, allowing Talbert to tackle them head-on. The playwright/producer says he and other black theatrical producers are giving the people what they want, just like Shakespeare did way back when.
“Shakespeare, who we hold in such high regard as the premiere playwright, performed his plays in front of people called ‘The Groundlings’ that would sit there in the theater and throw bottles, yell, and cuss and fuss at the stage so much so that they would then change the storylines to make it different,” Talbert said. “Theater was alive, it was interactive. That’s what we do. Theater that is alive and for the people.”
Writers, like everyone else have a myriad of personalities & characteristics. Why would anyone think otherwise?
As much as I love intelligent & stimulating conversation - much of the wisdoms I have learned & fully appreciate comes from some of my most illiterate, hard-working, "simple"& country relatives. One of my favorite family quotes: "Be what u gon' be."
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home