Program Notes WHAT PROBLEM?
yet we now understand this is much more complex. In our fractious era, I am compelled to elaborate on this “line” in terms of sexual politics, gender identity, class struggles, and especially at this moment in time, immigration. These ideas collide in my mind and my creative self like tectonic plates. Tectonic activity creates land formations, volcanic eruptions and rearranging of whole continents. What Problem? is the latest result of this social/political/spiritual grinding and reformation.
“For the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line . . . the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men . . . And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,— peculiar even for one who has never been anything else .”- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) I have long accepted Dr. King’s immortal words “We Shall Overcome” mixed with the scripture of our democracy as formed and shaped by we the people. And yet there’s always been an uneasy recognition of the truth at the base of the great W.E.B. Du Bois statement concerning “the Problem”. The “Color Line” for Du Bois represented the epitome of otherness,
Are you a problem? And what does it mean to be a problem?
All of my work is in pursuit of the “we”. What Problem? is the notion of “WE THE PEOPLE”.
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