Loading

Sarah Rogers

Rev. Dr. William Barber II on Maintaining a Moral Movement

Posted on by Sarah Rogers

This article by Thomasi McDonald was originally published on Duke Today as “William Barber on Maintaining a Moral Movement.”

Rev. Dr. William Barber II is a prominent political and religious leader who advocates for  “moral movements” that unite diverse coalitions and policies that promote the common good. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

Three days after the national election, Duke historian Adriane D. Lentz-Smith stood in front of nearly 300 people at the Hayti Heritage Center. Like the audience, she was looking to Rev. William J. Barber II, the national civil rights leader and one of the country’s leading theologians, to help her process her complex feelings about the election’s outcome.

Weeks before the election, Lentz-Smith said she had attended a Stevie Wonder concert in Greensboro, where the legendary recording artist taught the audience that love is not about people deserving it.

“It’s about us doing it because it’s necessary,” she said.

But post-election, Lentz-Smith said she was having a hard time holding on to Stevie Wonder’s lesson because she was experiencing a “sort of emotion between contempt and fury, and I can’t imagine that I’m the only person, and I can’t imagine that this isn’t something you’ve encountered before. And I’m wondering what do you do with this?”

A Duke Divinity alumnus, Barber did not disappoint the audience that gathered in the former sanctuary of one of Durham’s oldest historically Black churches. The celebrated theologian and distinguished historian participated in a riveting 70-minute conversation as part of the Kenan Institute’s Ethics of Now series, which Lentz-Smith has hosted since 2018.

Rev. Barber speaks into a microphone
Rev. Barber is an alumnus of two universities in Durham, N.C.: North Carolina Central University and Duke Divinity School. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

As much as any theologian of his generation, Barber can lay claim to the moral mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s social gospel movement. The Baptist preacher first came to the nation’s attention in 2013, when he organized the Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina, highlighted by what became known as the “Moral Monday” rallies at the state legislative complex in Raleigh, where nearly 1,000 people were arrested.

In 2015, he founded Repairers of the Breach to extend the Moral Monday movement as it grew nationally. In 2018, he helped to spearhead a revival of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign that was originally led by Dr. King.

Barber said the Christian tradition includes the concept of agape love.

“You love people, things, persons, situations, communities, because they need something other than what they have. And they may not give the love back to you. But if you don’t give it to them, you become them,” he said.

Barber added that he refuses to allow any moment in this country, even when it is at its worst, to turn him into a lesser being.

“If I become that, then I can’t be an instrument of [transformation,]” he said. “We’re human. We should hold on to that fury. Faith doubts. Faith has to have doubt within to be authentic faith. Love sometimes struggles with hate. I would say if you just felt a need to grieve [on Election Day], you’re probably a little late.”

Barber said “we should have been angry long before now,” adding that what happened on Election Day was the fruition of the “Southern Strategy” deployed by the Republican Party starting in the mid-60s at the height of civil rights legislation.

The strategy, Barber said, created what GOP leaders described as “positive polarization” that would “pit people against each other that should be allies.”

The anti-poverty leader said it was “a planned reality.”

“Doctor King in 1965, said the greatest fear of the oligarchs in this country is for the masses of poor negroes and poor white people to get together and form a voting bloc that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the country.”

Barber co-authored a recently published book, “White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy,” which focuses on the power of this multiracial coalition.

“I believe we ought to take every piece of public policy and ask more questions. Does it establish justice? Does it provide for common defense? Does this policy promote the general welfare? But I also add this from a Christian religious perspective — is it rooted in truth? Is it rooted in justice? Is it rooted in love? Is it rooted in mercy?”

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Barber also offered pointed criticism of the Democratic Party campaign strategy that dismissed the economic hardships of the working-class poor, and years ago abandoned the South’s most impoverished citizens.

“The number one economic issue was a living wage everywhere,” Barber said. “Living wage was on the ballot. It won. Why wasn’t living wages a major campaign issue?”

He addressed the audience’s concerns about the election’s implications, including Lentz-Smith’s remark that “we are bearing witness to a period of intensifying nativism and rancid racism.”

“We are in a crisis of civilization,” Barber said. “We’ve got some serious questions to ask about this crisis of civilization.”

Barber took to task white evangelicals, whom he described as “opportunists who wrapped defense of segregation in the language of morality,” and “Christian nationalists [who] fail any kind of faith moral test.”

Audience members listening to Barber speak
Nearly 300 people attended the event at the Hayti Heritage Center in downtown Durham. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

“I believe we ought to take every piece of public policy and ask more questions,” Barber said. “Does it establish justice? Does it provide for common defense? Does this policy promote the general welfare?

“But I also add this from a Christian religious perspective — is it rooted in truth? Is it rooted in justice? Is it rooted in love? Is it rooted in mercy?”

The civil rights leader said the nation should have grieved for the millions of people who died at the height of the covid epidemic.

“We lost 350,000 people, not from covid, but from the lack of health care,” he said. “And we entered covid [as] the only advanced country — so-called advanced country — that did not offer health care based on your humanity rather than your job.”

Barber also criticized corporate media titans who declined to endorse a presidential candidate.

“How can you not endorse when you have a candidate that everyday violates everything that the Lord hates?” he asked. “And I read in Proverbs 6 where it says the Lord hates proud eyes, a lying tongue, sowing division, hands that shed innocent blood. And then you look at everything Jesus said of a nation ought to be welcoming the immigrant, caring for the least of these.”

However, Barber said history shows that the politics of “arrogance, pride and injustice always goes too far and creates its own demise and creates the movement that takes it out,” and, he later added, “where the extremists go so far, they actually unite us.”

He encouraged the audience not to give in to despair.

“You’ve just been through an election,” Barber said. “You haven’t been through 250 years of slavery. You just went through an election, you haven’t been through 25 years of Jim Crow. So come on now. Let’s [not] glorify your pain too much.”

Lentz-Smith and Barber stand in front of an applauding audience
Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

 

Call for Applications: Regenerative Futures Lab

Posted on by Sarah Rogers

Regenerative Futures LabApplication deadline: December 5, 5:00 p.m.

Creating something new with the tools of the old does not work. Our current systems are failing us. But what might a new, better system look like?

Regenerative Futures Lab (rLab) is the place where students collectively try to figure out how to navigate paths to a re-imagined future that prioritizes the well-being of humans and the planet.

rLab is seeking high-level thinkers, detail-oriented individuals, and all skillsets in between. Applicants should be reflective, thoughtful, curious, and collaborative.

Projects are semester-long commitments, with a stipend. All Duke undergraduate students are eligible to apply. The theme of the 2024–2025 Academic Year is What Do We Owe to Each Other, with a focus on Dignity. See below for project descriptions.

Dying with Dignity:

Researchers will take an ethnographic approach to explore what Duke students think about death and dying as well as the larger question “what is a dignified end-of-life?”. In a non-hierarchical cohort structure, researchers will host and participate in on-campus Death Cafes, interview cafe participants, and reflect on their own experience with their cohort.

Dignity for All:

The project seeks researchers who are both big-picture thinkers and detail-oriented executors to design and realize a semester-long, cradle-to-grave project addressing the question “What is necessary to lead a life with dignity?” The goal is to collect data around this question and ideate actionable strategies to foster a world where dignity is a right, not a privilege. The team will develop a measurable project idea and deliverable that identifies the elements of a dignified life and how we, as an individual and community member, may achieve it.

Learn more about rLab

Click here to apply

Through Story of Bus Killing in Durham, N.C., “Changing Same” Exposes Discrimination and Violence Faced by Black Soldiers During Jim Crow

Posted on by Sarah Rogers
Illustration of an intersection of Broad St. and Club Blvd with memorial plaque, with a silhouette of a soldier projected onto it
A state historical marker just a few blocks north of Duke University’s East Campus commemorates Booker T. Spicely, a Black Army soldier killed by a bus driver in 1944. Spicely had challenged the bus driver’s demand that he move to the back of the bus. Illustration by Yunyi Dai.

A new play premiering this November, “Changing Same,” recounts an incident of racial violence that happened in Durham, North Carolina, just a few blocks north of Duke University’s East Campus — the 1944 killing of Private Booker T. Spicely, a Black Army soldier who pushed back against Jim Crow segregation laws.

After spending an evening on leave in Durham’s Hayti district, Spicely was traveling on a bus back to Camp Butner when the driver, Herman Council, ordered him to move to the back. After initially arguing that he was wearing the same uniform as the white soldiers on the bus, Spicely compiled. When Spicely exited the bus, Council followed and shot him in the heart with a .38 caliber pistol.

Spicely was transported to nearby Watts Hospital, but was refused treatment on account of his race. He was taken to Duke Hospital and died shortly afterward.

At the time, the bus system in Durham was operated by Duke Power, now Duke Energy. Duke Power paid Council’s $2500 bail and kept him on the job. Council was tried and acquitted by an all-white jury, who deliberated for fewer than 30 minutes.

James Williams, former chief public defender for Orange and Chatham counties and longtime civil rights activist, said that he first encountered Spicely’s story while doing historical research on Durham attorney C.J. Gates, who prosecuted the case against Council.

“The more I read, the more I was convinced that something needed to be done,” Williams said. He called several people he knew in Durham, and the Booker T. Spicely Committee was formed.

The committee first applied for a state historical marker to commemorate and honor Spicely. Their application was successful, and the marker was placed at the intersection of Broad Street and Club Boulevard in Durham in December 2023. It stands between the spot where Spicely was shot, now Club and Berkeley Street, and the hospital that refused to treat him, now the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

The committee also petitioned Duke Energy to fund several initiatives: a scholarship in Spicely’s name at the North Carolina Central University School of Law, a symposium, and the commissioning of a play telling Spicely’s story.

When Duke Energy granted their request, the committee wrote to Mike Wiley asking him to write the play. It was the first he’d heard of Booker T. Spicely.

“The arts take a black-and-white picture and fill in all of the shading and the colors. It gives it the dimensions that allow an audience to walk in the shoes of these characters, of these real-life individuals. That’s the importance of being able to utilize art, especially theater, to be able to share history.”

– Mike Wiley

“I spend so much of my time knee-deep in North Carolina history,” Wiley said. “It shocked me that I didn’t know the story of Private Spicely.”

Wiley is an acclaimed actor, playwright, and documentary artist who writes and performs one-man shows about key episodes in African American history. He co-directs America’s Hallowed Ground, a program of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that works with communities reckoning with painful histories through the power of the arts.

Wiley said that his initial reaction to hearing Spicely’s story gave him an entry point into writing the play.

“You hear it from someone, and then you hear another version or another angle from someone else, and that spurs you on to want to know more about it,” he said. “You want to know every little bit that you can possibly find out about the story.”

Wiley brought on a frequent collaborator, playwright Howard Craft, to co-write “Changing Same.” After assembling their research, they developed the play as a series of monologues from different characters, giving different perspectives on the bus shooting and Council’s trial.

Because they knew from the beginning that they were writing a one-man play that Wiley would perform, they didn’t have to worry about finding an actor who could embody its diverse characters, who range widely in age, race, and gender.

That, Wiley said, is his “wheelhouse.”

Mike Wiley leans against a table and looks at a laptop screen
At an early rehearsal for “Changing Same,” Wiley looks at a concept for set design on director Joseph Megel’s laptop. He was holding a cane that he intended to use as a prop while playing Gideon, the elderly character who opens the show. Photo credit: Sarah Rogers.

“It may sound cliché, but no one does it like he does,” said Tracy Francis, a production manager  who has worked with Wiley for nearly 20 years.

It was a few minutes before a “Changing Same” rehearsal in Swain Hall at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Francis was setting up tables for a read-through of the play, along with the play’s director, Joseph Megel, and dramaturg, Elisabeth Corley.

Wiley arrived with a wooden cane, saying he was “going to play with it for Gideon,” the first character to appear in the play.

Gideon’s advanced age becomes obvious as soon as Wiley starts to recite his first monologue — recite, not read, because he closes his eyes as he speaks, rocking his head from side to side. He strokes his thumb against his shirt, seemingly unconsciously. Even the way he holds his lips against his teeth suggests that some of them are loose or missing.

“He’s definitely aged since the last reading,” said Francis, and everyone in the room laughed.

The second character to appear is Mitchell Byrd, an Army lieutenant. As Byrd, Wiley’s spine straightens. All of his movements are controlled and economical, making his smallest motions significant. Before he even asks a question, his eyes narrow into the slightest of squints, looking for — no, demanding — the “Yes, sir”  he wants to hear. The effect is authoritative. Byrd is a soldier on a mission.

That mission is to determine the likelihood of civil unrest in Durham following the Council trial and its expected verdict of “not guilty.” Byrd lists three additional incidents in the U.S. South, all taking place within the previous two years, in which bus drivers shot Black soldiers, killing or seriously injuring them. None resulted in a guilty verdict.

“This scene does so much work,” director Joseph Megel said, admiring the monologue.

This scene shows the audience that although the Spicely case is specific to Durham, it is not an isolated one. In spite of serving their countries at home and abroad, Black soldiers and veterans faced rampant discrimination across the United States, and when this discrimination escalated into violence, there was no justice for its victims.

“It’s tough,” James Williams said, his voice full of emotion, as he recalled the first time he read about Spicely’s murder. “How cruel people can be. And it’s not just an individual case. I mean, this is systemic.”

Williams recounted the case of Isaac Woodard, a Black World War II veteran who was traveling home on a bus in South Carolina in 1946 when he had a disagreement with the bus driver about stopping to use the restroom. The driver radioed the police, and when Woodard exited the bus, they beat him with nightsticks. Woodard was permanently blinded.

It’s important to remember cases like Spicely’s and Woodard’s, Williams said, and to educate younger generations about them, because of the ways that the past continues to reverberate in the present.

“I think about James Baldwin, when he talked about ‘We are trapped in history, and history is trapped in us,’” he said. “And until we appreciate that more robustly, I think we’ll never grasp how wide and how deep the changes need to be.”

Wiley believes that the arts can help audiences not only to understand history, but also to experience it, in all its emotional resonance.

“The arts take a black-and-white picture and fill in all of the shading and the colors,” Wiley said. “It gives it the dimensions that allow an audience to walk in the shoes of these characters, of these real-life individuals. That’s the importance of being able to utilize art, especially theater, to be able to share history. Art, in a way, is the bridge between the past and the present.”

“Changing Same: The Cold-Blooded Murder of Booker T. Spicely” runs November 7–10 at Swain Hall at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and November 14–17 at Brody Theater in Branson Hall on Duke University’s East Campus.

Part of The Process Series at UNC, the play is presented by StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance and America’s Hallowed Ground at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

To Help Engineers Build Better, Character Forward Aims to Build Better Engineers

Posted on by Sarah Rogers
A man excitedly speaks to a woman
Genevieve Lipp (left) listens to colleague Eric Brubaker as he responds to her presentation about promoting the virtue of resilience in her first-year computing course. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.

Mid-presentation, Rich Eva tried to advance his PowerPoint, and failed. “I think I just broke the clicker,” he said.

“There might be an engineer here who can help you!” someone called out. 

Laughter rang out, because Eva’s audience was almost entirely faculty and staff from the Pratt School of Engineering.

Eva is not an engineer. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Baylor University earlier this year, he joined the Pratt School of Engineering to direct a new initiative, Character Forward. Created to help integrate ethics into the undergraduate engineering curriculum, Character Forward is a partnership between Pratt and The Purpose Project at Duke, which is a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School, and the Office of the Provost, funded by The Duke Endowment.

A man speaks into mic
Character Forward director Rich Eva leads a workshop on character education in Blue Devil Tower on October 15. In a pre-workshop interview, Eva emphasized that character education is about changing people, not just changing their actions. “What we want is for people to be foundationally good people, doing the right thing for the right reasons, out of a deep disposition and love for others,” he said. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.

At a recent workshop on character education, Eva asked attendees to discuss how much they learned about ethics in their training as engineers. Many of the professors in the room shared that they had no exposure to ethics in their undergraduate education at all.

By not incorporating ethics into curricula, Eva said, we can inadvertently send the message that they don’t matter. He pointed to studies showing that the students at the end of an average engineering education leave with less concern about others’ well-being than when they started. 

“Engineering undergraduates are coming away with less empathy,” he said. “No one was explicitly trying to teach students that, but somehow, something was communicated that ended up shifting them that way.” 

Eva acknowledged that engineering faculty might be worried about teaching ethics because they felt they lacked the necessary expertise. He assured them that you don’t need to know the correct answer to every moral question to teach ethics. 

In fact, he said, there are compelling reasons to take a different approach: by focusing less on the question of “What is the right or wrong thing to do?” and more on “What kind of person I should be?”

“A lot of engineers will face problems that we are not able to think of,” Eva said. Instead of preparing them with ethical knowledge, he said, “It’s a better bet to make them better people who can make better decisions.”

Character education aims to do this by habituating virtues, or positive character traits. “Virtues are stable dispositions to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reasons,” Eva said.

Two professors gave presentations on the ways they’re intentionally weaving character education into their current courses.

Cameron Kim speaks into a mic in front of a screen
Cameron Kim describes how he incorporates character education in his course on biomedical models. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.
A woman stands in front of a screen reading "Resilience and Collaboration in First-Year Computing"
Lipp delivers a presentation about promoting resilience in her first-year computing course, EGR 105, which two-thirds of Pratt students take. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.

Genevieve Lipp discussed her first-year computing course, where she creates structures to teach resilience. Feedback loops, for example, help students to “engage in the learning cycle even when there are setbacks,” which can also promote another virtue: temperance.

Can first-year students display temperance? “Some do!” Lipp said. And this also helps them to master the material. “Self-control is how you make the most of a learning cycle,” she said.

While Cameron Kim teaches a dedicated course on the ethics of biomedical engineering, he also prioritizes character education in his course on Modeling Cellular and Molecular Systems. He lists developing curiosity and intellectual humility as course objectives on the syllabus, and he asks students to take quizzes by The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley to measure how well they demonstrate these virtues  and to reflect on their scores. 

“I was in awe of what they reflected on,” Kim said. “Students were humble and said, ‘This taught me a lot about myself.’”

Other professors shared strategies for building character outside of the classroom, including David Schaad and Ann Saterbak, who lead DukeEngage programs in developing countries. Working with less-resourced communities teaches students humility, resourcefulness, and gratitude, they said.

Highlighting the need for engineering students to develop empathy and kindness, Bill Walker pointed out that the highest-performing teams at Google had one common characteristic: psychological safety. “Creating an environment of safety can shape what people rise to,” he said.

A woman sitting at a workshop table speaks
Siobhan Oca (center) poses a question to her colleague. While Oca teaches a dedicated course on ethics in robotics, she is committed to learning more. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.

Siobhan Oca, who teaches a course on Case Studies on Ethics in Robotics and Automation, emphasized that she sees Character Forward as a growth opportunity. 

“There’s so much to learn, and I’m so glad we have Rich Eva coming in and helping to facilitate this at Pratt,” she said.

During the workshop, Eva emphasized that he believed that integrating ethics into the engineering curriculum should take a bottom-up approach, not a top-down one. Oca echoed this.

“I think that this effort, if it’s going to be incremental in every class, needs to be incremental in every class,” she said. “There are already things that we do in preparing engineers who are doing things for the good of society, but being intentional will have a bigger and better effect.”

Incorporating character education across the curricula — not just in specialized courses — is important, she said. “If we’re reinforcing these ideas, that’s how we end up with the best students we can at the end of their college experience.”

Announcing Our 2024–2025 Graduate Arts Fellows

Posted on by Sarah Rogers

The Kenan Institute of Ethics has awarded 2024–2025 Graduate Arts Fellowships to Indigo Cook, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis; Sadé M Jones, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis; and Bren Vienrich-Felling, a second-year student in the MFA Program in Experimental & Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA).

Read more about our fellows and their project descriptions below.

Indigo Cook

 

Were/Where


Were/Where — every full moon, somewhere on campus… Drawing inspiration from both the avant-garde tradition of Happenings and popular concerts with secret locations, Were/Where is a new offering and a new proposition for the Duke community. We gather at a unique campus location each month on the full moon to discover ways to be, move, and play together.

Were/Where begins each full moon as a participatory performance art pop-up event that uses scores and invitations to realized actions for both the performers and anyone passing by. It closes as a site for community activation: a performance-turned-picnic that encourages connection and conversation (and snacks). The pairing of experimental performance practices with participatory audience engagement, and their ultimate synthesis and transformation into a social gathering, aims to open a space on Duke’s campus for both a rigorous curiosity and a sense of playfulness, sincere collective intention and absurd performative action, unexpected relationships and deepened connectivity.

Sadé M Jones

It’s A Vibe!

It’s A Vibe! workshop series is an immersive practice that aims to engage the participants through the act of social interpenetration and interdependence. The invitation is to be present with the internal process of excavation while being in conversation with others who are doing the same without losing one’s ‘self’ or compromising the integrity of the ‘collective’. By practicing the vibratory oscillation between internal and external environments, the skill of recognizing and operating in universality and nuance within group and inter-group contexts may be achieved.

The series will include two workshops pairing the core elements of musicality across the African Diaspora with elements of movement dynamics to trouble the position of dance and music within the Western lens. Sadé’s aim is to offer a different base of knowing with which to engage in the conversation of arts in relation to culture and society.

Bren Vienrich-Felling

In Her Hands:
Women Cultivating North Carolina’s Land

What does it mean to be a woman working in agriculture? In Her Hands: Women Cultivating North Carolina’s Land explores this question through the documentation of the harvest and people of four farms where conscientious farming practices and intentional investments in education are shaping the future of farming.

Through experimental imaging and documentary photography, Bren Vienrich-Felling invites viewers to consider how conceptions of gender influence access and acceptance of roles within agriculture. Felling explores these women’s experiences in farming from the lens of a farmer’s daughter; the project responds to the obstacles and resistance Felling witnessed her mother and aunt overcome as they moved into the role of managing the family’s cattle ranch in the Amazon of Peru. Now documenting woman farmers in her adopted homeland of North Carolina, Felling reflects on the strength, resilience, and adaptability of those who, rising above stereotypes and preconceived notions, embrace the ways they are particularly fit to sustain, educate and nourish their families and surrounding communities through their farms.

In New Solo Dance Performance, Aya Shabu Tells Story of Family Inheritance — and How She “LandED” in Durham

Posted on by Sarah Rogers
A woman gestures onstage.
Aya Shabu rehearses her solo dance performance, “LandED.” A dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist, Shabu uses movement to tell stories and express emotion. Photo credit: Naveed Moeed.

If you’re passing through Durham, North Carolina’s historic neighborhoods on a Saturday morning — like Hayti, Black Wall Street, or West End, home of the legendary Pauli Murray — you might find Aya Shabu leading a group of people on a walking tour. Shabu not only narrates the stories of these places: she performs them, delivering monologues that conjure up the Durham of another place and time, in the voices of the people who inhabited it.

As a collaborating artist with the Kenan Institute for Ethics signature program America’s Hallowed Ground, Shabu has guided students and community members through the painful history of the coup d’etat and race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, using movement-based exercises.

A woman gestures towards descriptive words written on a white board
Aya Shabu gestures towards a white board covered with evocative words as she leads a March 2023 workshop with America’s Hallowed Ground at the arts organization DREAMS of Wilmington.

Now the Durham-based dancer and teaching artist will bring her own story to the stage in her solo performance of “LandED,” a narrative dance journey that explores Shabu’s many inheritances from her Bajan immigrant family. A production of StreetSigns Center for Literature of Performance, “LandED” is presented by America’s Hallowed Ground.

“Like Ntozake Shange’s ‘for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,’ Aya’s ‘LandED’ weaves a tapestry of place and time, of womanhood and finding a life grounded in Durham,” said America’s Hallowed Ground co-director Mike Wiley, who is co-directing “LandED “with Joseph Megel.

Over email, Shabu and Wiley answered questions about the play, its relationship to Durham, and why site-specific art matters. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tell us about your connections to Durham, N.C., and its histories. 

Aya Shabu: I’ve been doing historic walking tours of African American neighborhoods in Durham since 2012. I tell stories about the past using my body to bring them into the present as I embody people, places, and forces.

I’m a preservationist. I love old people and old buildings because they tell the story of a place. When I started looking for a house to buy, I wanted an old house — not only because it was more affordable, but because I wanted to know its story. The house we bought had years upon years, layers upon layers of stories. The house was so damaged — water, mold, multiple fires — we had to renovate down to the studs. But when we were tearing out the chimney’s brick by bricks — the most tedious work I’ve ever done — we did find something invaluable: one half of a Fitzgerald brick.* A small piece of Pauli’s Murray’s history in our house!

How did you get involved with America’s Hallowed Ground? What work have you done with the project? How does this play relate to that work?

Mike Wiley: Aya began this journey with America’s Hallowed Ground long before it was even formed. Charlie Thompson and I began collaborating with Aya in 2010 at the Center for Documentary Studies when she choreographed my play “The Parchman Hour.”

“Aya is the embodiment of how we tell difficult stories about difficult places and events through art. It’s the kind of artistry we seek to support and draw inspiration from.”

– Mike Wiley

In the years since, Aya has established a reputation and presence in the Durham community as a dancer, historian, storyteller, documentarian, and much more. Her ability to use dance and history to embody not only individuals and events, but also emotional journeys made Aya the perfect artist for us to partner with.

She’s helped us share the story of Wilmington 1898 by visiting our classes and co-leading workshops between Wilmington and Durham. Most recently, Aya helped bring the story of Pauli Murray alive for our classes through her Whistle Stop Tours and class visits.

Aya is the embodiment of how we tell difficult stories about difficult places and events through art. It’s the kind of artistry we seek to support and draw inspiration from. It was a natural choice to support her choreopoem “LandED” and help bring it to life.

What universal human experiences do you think this play touches on?

Aya Shabu: Mother-daughter relationships. Familial expectations. The prodigal son — or daughter, in this case. Striving for the American dream through immigration and homeownership. Family secrets. Respectability politics. These are all pretty universal themes.

We cover a lot of ground in the play: gender bias, classism, and a person’s right to choose their gender expression and what happens to their bodies. Tupac said it:

Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don’t, we’ll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies that make the babies (Oh, yeah-yeah)
And since a man can’t make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one.

What are you hoping that Durham audiences take away from this play?

Aya Shabu: That our individual stories have value past, present, and future. That our stories can be educational, instructive, aspirational, and healing. But we must tell them.

 

“LandED” is onstage October 4, 5, and 6, 2024, at Brody Theater at Branson Hall on Duke University’s East Campus. Tickets are $20 for a general audience and $10 for students and seniors.

Buy Tickets

 

*Pauli Murray’s great-uncle, Richard Fitzgerald, was an extremely successful brickmaker and entrepreneur. Some of Durham’s most famous historical structures are constructed with Fitzgerald bricks, which are inlaid with a distinctive geometric pattern.