WANTED: Freedom! dead or alive

(Saturday, 11:30-1:00)

“WANTED: Freedom! dead or alive” is a collaborative work featuring the mime, movement  and mask-work created by Aretta Baumgartner and performed by Kim Popa, and songs and dramatic readings by Daryl Harris. Through traditional Negro Spirituals, classic and contemporary poetry, and archival “Runaway Slave Ads,” the ritual theatre-styled performance brings to life legacies of women and men who sought and fought for freedom by any means necessary.

The thirty minute presentation is inspired by the groundbreaking research and forthcoming database of Dr. Prince Brown, Jr., co-founder and former director of Northern Kentucky University’s Institute for Freedom Studies. For the past several years Dr. Brown has worked to codify the contents of thousands of newspaper records from the late Nineteenth Century. The ignominy of the existence of “Runaway Slave Ads” notwithstanding, these texts are intriguing.  The succinct personal details that plantation owners supplied in order to effectively indentify “their” runaways provide a previously untapped trove of individualized mini-biographies.  Generic enslaved people become “sullen Susan,” or “…a devilish thief and rogue, Abraham.”

Honoring their essence, Popa gives the Susans and Abrahams flesh and bones through mask and movement. Harris breathes spirit into them via the words of songs they themselves may have sung, as well as words later penned by their ancestors. This piece honors those who sought freedom, often by choosing the ultimate freedom, the ultimate life –death.

Before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord—and be saved.
                                                             Traditional

Daryl L. Harris, MFA, PhD
harrisda@nku.edu