“I read it over a weekend and thought, wow, this really could be something,” explained Paul Vasterling, Artistic Director at the Nashville Ballet. Tonight at 9:00 pm, PBS will present a filmed performance of Black Lucy and The Bard as part of its Great Performances showcase, an original ballet based on the book Lucy Negro, Redux. During a recent TCA press conference, the creative team behind this production gathered together to pull back the curtain and reveal how the show came to be. “The process of bringing the ballet to life and figuring out how we make this book of poems, that is really not linear, adding some linearity to it and making it a story that could become a dance. It was so much fun to work with Caroline and Rhiannon, and it was truly a collaborative process the whole way through, along with the lead ballerina whose name is Kayla Rowser, who actually had a big part in the creation of the choreography.” Paul’s credits on the production also include Choreographer and Stage Production Director.
(Courtesy of Heather Thorne)
“I studied abroad at Oxford as an undergrad,” revealed Caroline Randall Williams, author of Lucy Negro, Redux, who was a lifelong Shakespeare fan and first read a story about the bard’s scandalous love life with a woman known as the “Dark Lady” in an August 2012 issue of the Daily Mail. “I discovered reporting on a finding of Duncan Salkeld, who was a professor at University of Chichester, that put Black Luce, who was a woman known to history, in the same room as Shakespeare in an Elizabethan prison record. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God. How exciting!’ There have been several candidates for the Dark Lady over time. And Black Luce has sort of been positive for frilly but then dismissed for one reason or another. There are people who say, ‘Oh, she's not Black. Just her character was black,’ because she was a brothel owner. But there's a record of Blacks in Britain specifically in the area of London where her brothel was in that time period. And then there's the record of the sonnets. ‘Then will I swear beauty herself is black, and all they foul that thy complexion lack,’ talking about my mistress eyes and hairs be wires, black wires grow from her head. You know, he's actually talking about her color, the texture of her hair, the brownness of her breasts in these sonnets. So, I think that it's Black Luce. I think this brothel owner was a Black woman, and I'm very excited about the legitimacy of her candidacy as the Dark Lady. So I went to London, I saw the prison records with Dr. Salkeld, and I was overcome with getting to walk on these same stones all while clerking in London where Shakespeare might have walked and where Lucy ran her business. I started working on this book, and here we sit today.”
An original ballet needs original music and Paul turned to Grammy Award-Winner Rhiannon Giddens. “At the time that this opportunity came my way, I had just made the acquaintance of a fantastic musician, Francesco Turrisi, who ended up composing the score with me, and he just happened to be an Italian musician who had been playing in an early music group called L'Arpeggiata but also was a jazz improvisational cast and had combined those two things and had a deep cultural understanding of the Mediterranean, including Northern Africa and the percussion tradition from that area,” the composer shared. “They have tried to get him to play at The Globe. He knows intimately the music that was from the era but is also very deeply into the improvisational aspect of this music and connecting it to my vantage point of the American self, which is so much of where Caroline is coming from. So, it was kind of like I was representing Caroline's side, and he was representing Shakespeare's side, so we were able to blend those together in a way I don't think I would have been able to do with anybody else. It's a unique pairing. I really think it's all about how we collaborated and then how we collaborated in turn with Caroline and Paul and the dancers.”
(Courtesy of Heather Thorne)
“I think the primary reason was that it was story-driven,” explained Great Performances Executive Producer David Horn on the decision to include Black Lucy and The Bard this season. “It was just so unique to have this idea… We made a tremendous effort to bring Shakespeare to American public and with our collaboration with the public theater, a very diverse Shakespeare project over the past three years. So, this just had all the buttons, the opportunity to work with Rhiannon, Caroline, and Paul. It's also one of the missions. I keep talking about the mission, but one of the missions of Great Performances is try to shine a light on the great regional companies, arts organizations, and companies we have here, and we had never done anything about Nashville, even though we have quite a history of doing many Balanchine ballets at the Grand Ole Opry studios 40 years ago.”
Black Lucy and The Bard is the culmination of a lifelong dream for author Caroline Randall Williams. “I wanted to be an actress,” she confessed about her role as the narrator in the production. “I came to Shakespeare as a child through children's theatre, I was an apprentice in the National Shakespeare Company. I studied in London. I was an apprentice at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, in high school. And then my mom sort of said, ‘You can't go to conservatory. You've gotta go to college.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And, so, I went to Harvard and studied how to write poetry. I became one step less practical instead of more, I think, arguably. So, all of that to say I didn't know quite when I was writing Lucy that my poems were quite as performative as they've turned out to be or that they lent themselves quite as well to performing. But I always write imagining how it’s going to sound, how it’s going to be delivered, the cadence of the poem is more important to me than how it lands on the page, ultimately. So, getting to get back on stage with my own poetry felt so empowering. It was such a massive gift, and to get to do that with the creative genius of Paul's choreography, the artists who were embodying the story, and then Rhiannon, we stalked her because she's been a hero of mine since I was literally a teenager, so getting to put my art together with hers was just a wild gift.”
Don’t miss Black Lucy and The Bard tonight at 9:00 pm on PBS, part of Great Performances.
(Please note this article contains affiliate links. Your purchase will support LaughingPlace by providing us a small commission, but will not affect your pricing or user experience. Thank you.)