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BLESSING THE BOATS. By Sekou Sundiata. Directed by Rhodessa Jones. Arizona State University Gammage Auditorium, Tempe. 19 November 2005.
Sekou Sundiata's one-man performance tells the story of a human body in illness and the productions of self that emerge from that telling. A poet and a seasoned performer who was part of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Sundiata has taken blessing the boats through numerous iterations since its debut. The piece borrows its title from Lucille Clifton's poem, and like the benedictory voice of that poem, Sundiata relates stories about perilous but blessed journeys in his performance. The stories emerge from the artist and the people he encountered leading up to his kidney transplant in 1999. Opening in 2002 in New York, the piece has been performed in over twenty cities, many times in conjunction with transplant awareness programs and conferences. On the evening of 19 November at Arizona State University's Gammage Auditorium, the Arizona Kidney Foundation offered green "Donate Life" bracelets as a gift to the audience as they entered the theatre.
The Gammage can accommodate up to three thousand, but that night, the small audience was intimately seated in five rows set up on the stage itself. The sparse set consisted of a desk and a rolling chair stage right, a podium stage left, and a white screen hung center stage on which Sundiata projected images and words throughout the performance. The middle-aged Sundiata wore a simple brown button-up shirt and pants. He ranged between the desk,...