LUCY NEGRO, REDUX: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet

by Caroline Randall Williams, Paul Vasterling (Libretto by)

Overview

"Part lyrical narrative, part bluesy riff, part schoolyard chant and part holy incantation" — New York Times Lucy Negro, Redux, uses the lens of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets to explore the way questions about and desire for the black female body have evolved over time, from Elizabethan England to the Jim Crow South to the present day. Equally interested in the sensual and the serious, the erotic and the academic, this collection experiments with form, dialect, persona, and voice. Ultimately a hybrid document, Lucy Negro Redux harnesses blues poetry, deconstructed sonnets, historical documents and lyric essays to tell the challenging, many-faceted story of the Dark Lady, her Shakespeare, and their real and imagined milieu. Inspired by the book, The Nashville Ballet will premiere “Lucy Negro Redux,” an original ballet conceived and choreographed by Artistic Director&CEO, Paul Vasterling, in February 2019 at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. A collaboration of music, poetry and choreography, this contemporary ballet based on Caroline Randall Williams’ book of poetry of the same name is unique in process, content and format. The project uses dance and music to execute the author’s exploration of more than 160 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and her arrival to a thesis that the “Dark Lady” and the “Fair Youth”—the subjects and inspiration of these sonnets—were undoubtedly a black woman and a young man lover. Ultimately, in experiencing Lucy through themes of love, otherness and equality, the narrator, and thus the audience, finds a powerful female voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734842210
Publisher:	Third Man Books
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer and and educator in Nashville Tennessee. She is co-author of the Phyllis Wheatley Award-winning young adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, and the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe and the New York Times. Her debut collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet (Third Man Books, Spring 2019) is currently being turned into a ballet.
Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer and and educator in Nashville Tennessee. She is co-author of the Phyllis Wheatley Award-winning young adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, and the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe and the New York Times. Her debut collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet (Third Man Books, Spring 2019) is being turned into a ballet to debut in 2019.
Paul Vasterling’s artistic career began at age 10 when he started studying piano, then expanded at age 16 when he started dancing. From this start, Vasterling landed at Nashville Ballet where he became a company dancer, teacher, ballet master and choreographer. He stepped into the role of Artistic Director of Nashville Ballet in 1998, ten years after he began his association with the organization. A choreographer with a deep affinity for music, Vasterling has created over 40 works, ranging from classical, full-length story ballets to contemporary one-acts. With a special focus on highlighting the wealth of artistry and rich history of Nashville, Vasterling's connection to music and passion for community have led to collaborations with numerous nationally and internationally renowned musicians and institutions including The Bluebird Cafe, Ben Folds, Rhiannon Giddens and more; Nashville Ballet has commissioned 22 original scores for brand-new ballets under his direction. Vasterling is also a gifted storyteller with a penchant for creating vivid narratives such as Peter Pan, Layla and the Majnun, Lizzie Borden, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Nashville's favorite holiday tradition, Nashville's Nutcracker. Vasterling's choreographic credits extend beyond ballet to the recent Nashville Children's Theatre production Dragons Love Tacos. Beyond his own choreography, Mr. Vasterling has expanded the company’s repertoire to include works by Salvatore Aiello, George Balanchine, James Canfield, Lew Christensen, Jirí Kylián, Twyla Tharp and Christopher Wheeldon, among many others. He has also edited and updated the classic productions Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake and has grown the company from a troupe of 12 to 25 professional dancers. With a commitment to cultivating an organization high on artistry and dramatic power, Vasterling has taken Nashville Ballet across the country and beyond—Nashville Ballet's company made its Kennedy Center debut in 2017 and has toured throughout the U.S. including performances in St. Louis, Charleston and an upcoming debut at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2018. The company has also toured internationally in South America and Europe, and many of Vasterling's original works have been staged by companies nationally and internationally. Vasterling graduated Magna Cum Laude from Loyola University. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has been awarded many prestigious fellowships—Vasterling is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, and was selected as one of the Fellows in residence for the 2017-18 academic year at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

Read an Excerpt

BLACKLUCYNEGRO I The idea of her warm brown body long stretching under his hands is a righteous want— she’s become an Other way to talk about skin, the world-heavy mule of her, borne line by line down the page: run and tell everything, every truth you ever knew about BlackLucyNegro. Say she is the loose light. Say she is the root. Say she ate at his table. Say she ate at all. Say she. Say she. Say she. ANATOMY OF LUST i. the red room of my body the pain that rattles me with sparking a prick of blood on the tip on the tip a prick blood pricks the tip of the prick on a tip of blood the blood the tip of of of ii. What part shame, the anatomy of lust? What part humiliation? What part exposure? What part transgression? What part chthonic impulse?— Bet Persephone got just a little bit wet toward the end of summer, and Hades on her mind. NUDE STUDY OR, SHORTLY BEFORE MEETING LUCY. A WHITE BOY. Once, in the night with maybe one lamp glowing, My shirt was finally raised over my head, My brassiere unclasped, tights rolled down And underwear offed—hip, knee, ankle. Then, what would you think of my body? Had you ever negotiated such coarse hair, Seen nipples dark and darker in their tensing, Breasts swaying sideways with the weight Of them? Did you know how much it was to ask, To be the first glimpse of a naked black body? Did you know the fear of being found fearful? And later, after you’d grown accustomed, Proved yourself equal to the task of my landscape, You laughed and said, let’s play masters and slaves. I wore it lightly, said no, moved on, But it made me think about my teeth on the couch, Glowing white there in the light of the television Against my skin, made me grateful for my perfume Covering the smell of my body, made me wonder When it would be time again to get a relaxer Before my hair betrayed my best efforts To straighten it, made me alive to all the offenses Nature is prone to. When you said Let’s play masters and slaves, you thought Role play. I thought black girl

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams has unearthed a new folk hero, a harbinger of the suppressed Black feminine. The voice in these exceptional poems is an active subversion to deep-rooted, but still relevant, western misogyny. Lucy Negro is no one’s muse, side-piece, or hush thing; she is an ironic blues in a familiar Shakespearean tapestry. The rhythmic vernacular and authentic lexicon urges us to read these poems out loud: I break it if I bought it,/ I own it if I caught it,/ I spend it if I got it./ Is this a 16thcentury European or the reincarnation of Bessie Smith? She is both. Randall Williams reminds us that the past is created from the now moment. As much as Lucy is historical artifact, she is a voice we need right now. This is more than historical poetry that relays facts. This is an unapologetic Black sonnet/song. The author has successfully avoided that debut we tend to disown later in our writing careers; rather, Randall Williams has produced a manuscript that should be heard, sung, examined, then reexamined until Lucy comes crawling out our collective eyes, ears, throats and reticence.  —Derrick Harriell (Author of Cotton and Ropes)

Caroline Randall Williams' debut collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux, is a fearless, mesmerizing accomplishment. Brilliant, sensual, and always powerful, Lucy Negro, Redux dares us (and all Others) to gaze directly at the complex silhouette of beauty shackled inside of Shakespeare's famous 'Dark Lady Sonnets', and the playwright's own shrouded avowal "...I will declare that Beauty herself is black". Explicit in imagination and invention, Williams' achievement in these pages examines the (mis)coded vernacular of desire and its relationship to blackness, in plain sight. Black Luce, no longer stranded and silenced in a colorless narrative, blazes and burns with agency in Williams' symphonic odium of desire, race, and history. Williams writes, "Lucy, Lucy, even you's God's flesh."/This world ain't wanna see that yet." As Williams' (and Lucy's) readers, we are asked to witness the piecing vision of this collection, which is astute in its nuanced gaze at the psyche of poetry as flesh. Dazzling in ambition, Lucy Negro, Redux draws back the bright skin of language to reveal a raw and original (Blk!) nerve. —  Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Author of Mule and Pear, winner of the 2012 Black Caucus American Library Association’s Inaugural Poetry Award):

Interviews

From New Orleans Review Interview (with Kristin Sanders, author of Kuntry) : KS: The premise of the book is that Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady,” from sonnets 127 to 154, is “Black Lucy” or “Black Luce,” a black woman who ran a brothel during Shakespeare’s time. So you researched this actual, historical woman, and from there, the writing extends out to different eras, situations, women, and identities. The book has this gorgeous timelessness. And yet it feels very timely, given the Black Lives Matter movement and the lifting up of Black beauty, Black bodies. (I’m thinking of Viola Davis’ recent Emmy award, and her moving speech.) Your final two poems, “This Exiat Sayeth That” and “Lucy’s Exiat Sayeth That,” are especially powerful given this racially fraught moment—even globally speaking, with immigration in the US and abroad, and terrorism, all of this “us versus them” reactionary, stereotyping politics. You write, “We are fit for the degree of them that use us,” and “Lucy is burning,” and “The answer Lucy the new look question and truth of all the things a dark lady can be” (71). And the final line of the book: “By God if you warm and eat me, I will nourish and fatten you” (72). Your book ends on a note of hopefulness and triumph. Did you try to cultivate that feeling for the ending? And did you think about our current political moment as you were writing this? CRW: The short answer to your question is, of course. Yes. For me, writing poetry is an act of will, will to love life, love myself, love the world around me, even like it is. I work to put down words that will fortify that will in myself, and the people who read my poems. In the spirit of that intention, I very much wanted the end of my book to be both a celebration and a challenge, a reproach to those who pass unjust judgment, and an invitation to return, understand better, and judge again.

Editorial Reviews

From BookSlut: “Lucy Negro, Redux is a proud rallying cry of freedom and delight in the sublime magic of Blackness. Randall Williams is keen on dismantling the trope of the Black woman as the Mule of the World, a voiceless pleasure thing. Combining history with honesty and the sting of personal memories, Lucy is no man's "exotic" land to claim. She rises above, radical mortal instrument of God's beauty.” - Vanessa Willoughby. Full review: http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2015_09_021280.php

From Chapter 16: “While the premise of Lucy Negro, Redux might be academic, the collection couldn’t be further from the kind of antique manuscripts that may only be touched with gloves. These poems are tangible, very much of our own turbulent world. As the first poem, “BlackLucyNegro I,” explains, “she’s become an Other / way to talk about skin.” Williams pulls Lucy’s story into this world, examining both historical and contemporary problems of racism. This is a vital book, at once capable of searing insight and complex emotion. The poems speak to our time while giving voice to a ghost.” - Erica Wright Full review: https://chapter16.org/not-a-partridge-or-a-ruby/

From Cider Press Review: “As radical as the integration of Sally Hemmings’ descendants into Jefferson family reunions is Black Luce’s integration into the poetic ideals of the sonnet. There is more than cursing in Black Luce’s power. She manages to bless all her pan-African daughters. If “Lucy own her body/She run many other” as Williams reports, through Lucy, all young women of color embody the platonic ideal of Western Civilization’s finest love elegies. Through Williams’ reclamation of Shakespeare, African diasporic literature grows redolent with the possibility of being simply good literature without identity subdivisions, as worthy as Shakespeare, not other but Cleopatra to his Anthony, beloved for its narrative skill as Othello was to Desdemona, not separated, just elbow-to-elbow with the greats at the lunch counter, individual but never parenthetical. Buy this radical collection of poetry. Steal it if you must. Read it at all costs.” - Ann Babson Full review: http://ciderpressreview.com/reviews/a-welcome-bridge- lucy-negro-redux-by-carolyn-randall-williams-marches-on-shakespeare-for-black-southern-writers/#.WyAhxyMrKCg

From the Publisher