Kwelismith

Whether solo on ABC's "Nightline," with piano at the Kennedy Center, at Mount Vernon College with musical ensemble, in the woods behind the Anacostia Museum, or at a political rally, performance artist Kwelismith takes the audience where she wants them. As a poet, actress, vocalist, dancer, and educator, Kwelismith finds herself carving out a genre that crosses concert singing with theater monologue, making it her own personalized space as good as opera.

Named outstanding Emerging Artist and winner of the 1991 Mayor's Arts Award, Kwelismith brings to the stage personal testimony of a woman's experience. With a master's degree in counseling psychology, this graduate of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music uses her training as a singer to express her own African roots making her more an ethnomusicologist, a storyteller musician, better still, a griot. Through music, movement, socially conscious poetry/prose text, Kwelismith bares her bones.

In "Blues Print," a multidisciplinary work with slides, text, and jazz, she presents a side to the Philadelphia MoVE bombing, which examines the role of the press as image maker. In "Poetry in the Spiritual," she exposes the level of tightrope survival many African Americans walk teetering the edge of destruction. "In My Father's House" juxtaposes Bach with Aretha Franklin to tell a personal/metaphorical story on becoming a woman. "Follow the Drinkin Gourd" presents Harriet Tubman, conductor of the Underground Railroad in 1854, through slavesongs, poetry/dramatic monologue from Cambridge, Maryland, to Canada. "A Tree is Green" is a work-in-progress on censorship and the impact on marginalized communities. The performance work, "Brown Girl in the Ring," uses poems, percussion, blues Iyrics, and a child's game song to talk about AIDS and women's struggles with race in history.

Author of Slavesong: The art of singing, Blues Print and Brown Girl in the Ring (an audiotape), Kweli gives poetry readings from these works as well as new writings. For further information and bookings, contact Doris McGuffey (3OI) 336-31O4.