To answer the question of what it means to be an American citizen in these turbulent times, the poet Sekou Sundiata traveled the country for two years, conducting classroom discussions and attending potluck dinners to forage for people’s personal experiences to add to his own insights. The result is “The 51st (dream) State,” a hyperactive mosaic of poetry, music, dance and videotaped interviews that has its New York premiere on Wednesday at the Brooklyn
Mr. Sundiata, who teaches writing at the New School, does not call himself a performance poet, but his work is almost always performed. He has appeared on Russell Simmons’s “Def Poetry Jam” on HBO and written for theater (“blessing the boats”), and he has a Grammy-nominated recording of music and poems, “The Blue Oneness of Dreams,” to his name.
“This wasn’t just my personal narrative,” Mr. Sundiata, 58, said of his latest work. “It was the kind of ‘I’ Walt Whitman uses. I didn’t want to work in the traditional way.”
That is because “State” had its genesis after 9/11, he said, when like many citizens he began sifting through what he calls his “troubled love” for a country he had often critiqued. In some ways, he said, its ideological roots go back to his school days, he said, when the United States consisted of 48 states and he constantly wondered what land and what dreams it would claim next.
“I went on tour in 2001, right before 9/11, and I was looking at an itinerary,” Mr. Sundiata said during an interview in his tiny, spare New School office. “We were going to South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah. I took out a road atlas and I saw Nazareth and Bethlehem, Pa.; Trinidad, Ariz.; Warsaw, Fla. — all these places named after places in the world. World history is being dreamed despite the fact that America is conceptualized in a monochromatic way sometimes.
“I thought maybe the 51st state is a dream state,” he said. “I discovered an active discourse in academic circles about the 51st state. Maybe the 51st state is a state of war. Rumsfeld has said the 21st century will be a time of constant war. You need dream language to get at it.”
A tall man with a sonorous voice, Mr. Sundiata weaves his poetry into his 90-minute show:
A woman to my right worried a flag
the size of a handkerchief
the kind you get at the fairgrounds
And little Emmett Till came to me
a face that long ago cured
my schoolboy faith
in that lyric
So that I could no longer sing
With the voice of praise
As if it was my own
O Beautiful for spacious skies.
Onstage, giant screens project still and moving images: the rush of an interstate highway, a modern dance performance, a Japanese-American woman recalling her people’s internment during World War II or a young Indian-American describing a post-9/11 confrontation on a Boston subway because of his dark looks.
With music composed by Graham Haynes, “State” features four vocalists performing everything from classical Indian music to rhythm and blues and a range of musical instruments. Christopher McElroen, a founder of Classical Theater of Harlem, directs the show.
Despite his African name, Mr. Sundiata was himself born in Harlem. Originally named Robert Feaster, he renamed himself during the heady days of the civil rights marches and the black arts movement, and his progressive political sensibilities continue to shape his art.
“The whole nation has become niggerized,” he intones in a provocative poetic coda in “State,” meaning that the 9/11 attacks let all Americans taste the black American experience of feeling unsafe, subject to random violence, hated as a people.
“That expression came from a speech by Cornel West at Pasadena City College,” Mr. Sundiata explained. “He joined what happened on 9/11 to the history of African-Americans through slavery, through desegregation.” Excerpts from that speech by Mr. West, a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton, can be heard onstage during the performance, too.
Mr. Sundiata’s aspirations to open up a dialogue on the multiple meanings of the American experience led to something he called “The American Project.” It took him to workshops to sharpen what became “State” at Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall and a series of residencies and gatherings at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the work was previewed earlier this year; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford University.
Mr. Sundiata met with students, professors, artists and people in various neighborhoods. He asked: What is the American language? What does it mean to be the dominant country in the world? What future do people imagine? When he found powerful voices and ideas that shaped his thinking, Mr. Sundiata said, he turned on the camera. He is continuing to look for ideas this weekend, with discussions at Harlem Stage’s new facility, the Gatehouse.
In what it called “a companion” to Mr. Sundiata’s show, the Gatehouse at Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall was scheduled to present a reading of “The Trojan Women,” last night and a cabaret and discussion with Mr. Sundiata tonight on what it means to be an American citizen. WeDaPeoples Cabaret, organized and presided over by Mr. Sundiata, is an evening of spoken-word poetry and song, with guests including the “51st (dream) State” vocalists. Before the cabaret, from 1 to 5 p.m., there will be “The Gathering,” featuring speakers, a discussion and a community “sing.”
“It was quite fascinating,” said Gladstone Hutchinson, the former dean of students at Lafayette College, of Mr. Sundiata’s residency there. “The students absolutely loved him. We thought exploring what it means to be American in the 21st century after 9/11 would be perfect.”
Julie Ellison, a professor of American culture at the University of Michigan who also runs a program encouraging arts in the academy, called Mr. Sundiata’s work “complex and brilliant.”
The Walker Art Center preview of “State” was sold out and had people dancing onstage at the end of shows, said Reggie Prim, the center’s community programs manager. “It’s such a compelling way to link citizenship to art,” Mr. Prim said. “The idea is to seed a movement.”
Mr. Sundiata also took his show to Melbourne, Australia, last month. He had discovered the work of Dennis Altman, an Australian professor of politics whose new book “51st State?” explores the idea that Australia’s identification with America makes it a de facto 51st state. It is his hope, Mr. Sundiata said, that people leave “State” with a lot of voices in their head and enough questions for their own nuanced dialogues.
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