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.
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.
*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.
