Porgy and Bess

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PORGY AND BESS: AN EVOLUTIONARY WORK By Ethel Pitts Walker

Performance art requires an audience as well as an artist in order to accomplish its goal, and both entities must participate in the experience. The artist creates for the specific moment in which the audience engages in the performance, while the audience brings its collective values and mores in evaluating the work. Although the art may endure for ages, artists can only create their works for the audience of the originating time. DuBose Heyward wrote the novel Porgy for a 1925 audience; Dorothy Heyward adapted the novel into a play script and the Theatre Guild produced the script for a 1927 audience; George Gershwin composed Porgy and Bess for a 1935 audience. None of these artists envisioned a 2014 audience reading or viewing their art, and they certainly could not have imagined the eyes a 2014 audience would see through. To appreciate Porgy and Bess one must see through the eyes of the original artists and audiences, and then we must expand the tapestry to include ourselves as audience members with a totally different vision. The novel was written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most creative and intellectual periods in African American history. On the heels of World War I, the Harlem

Left to right, George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin.

Renaissance presented diverse pictures and ideas of African Americans in the arts and literature – African Americans who had long been the object of ridicule, scorn, and misinterpretation. With the advent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915, the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (National Urban League) in 1920, the publication of Crisis , Opportunity and Journal for African American History , and the widespread circulation of African American newspapers, new images emerged. African Americans took pride in their past, even as the struggle for equality became a battle cry in cities across the country. Whites took in the new images presented by writers such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, James

Weldon Johnson, and scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alaine Locke, and white socialite and critic Carl Van Vechten. Interesting and fresh works of art and literature were made available to the public. It is in this atmosphere of “newness” and unexplored images that Heyward found his Charleston, South Carolina, characters‘ distinct and unheard voices. As a native of Charleston, Heyward had a familiarity with the tenants of his fictional Catfish Row (Cabbage Row) environment. The residents were from the Gullah culture, a group of African Americans who knew well the life of slavery and Reconstruction, as they lived on the various islands surrounding the mainland and migrated to Charleston to find a “better” life. Isolated on the islands, the Gullah – or Geechee, as they were often called – long practiced many of their West African customs, traditions,

DuBose and Dorothy Heyward

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