By Janice Gaston
Kianga Ford has spent weeks studying Winston-Salem and its people. Through conversation and observation, she has learned enough about the city to weave a fictional tapestry that tells its story.
Ford is an artist who will be presenting a spoken-word performance, The Story of This Place, during the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival. Art patrons will be able to take a walking tour with MP3 players while they listen to her words and a soundtrack created by regional musicians. She will tell her stories through the thoughts of fictional characters inspired by the places she visited. They reveal snippets of their lives that help create a sense of place.
She will present 34 x 52 x 40, a combination of theater, music and spoken word, as the opening performance Wednesday at The Garage. Her performance will include selections of the narratives she has produced about Winston-Salem.
Ford’s project is part of “Inside Out: Artists in the Community II”, an effort by SECCA to retain public visibility during its year-long closure, curator Steven Matijcio said. Ford is using Winston-Salem as a canvas and a subject, he said. Ford, who lives in Los Angeles, has created similar projects in several towns, including Baltimore, Md., Syracuse, N.Y., and Bergin, Norway.
The Story of This Place will run until June 30, 2010.
In City of Progress, a work about North Miami, Ford takes visitors through the streets by speaking the words of such characters as Famous, a young man whose job at Burger King gives him respite from an unhappy home life, and Eddie, who wonders why the 99-cent store gets robbed all the time instead of the bank across the street. The story, which she narrated, runs about 38 minutes and illustrates demographic shifts that the area has experienced over the years.
Ford has explored the workings of Reynolds Tobacco Co., the architectural and social vision of Katharine Reynolds and the impact that tobacco has had on the town. Ford’s mother suffers from an illness caused by smoking.
“It’s no secret to anyone who knows me knows that I hate tobacco,” Ford said. But she found empathy and admiration for the work done by Reynolds Tobacco and the Reynolds family in such areas as workers’ rights and desegregation.
In Winston-Salem, she has been able to look at the history of segregation and desegregation in a more direct way than in cities where class shifts and immigration had more effects, she said. She visited the Stevens Center, where blacks weren’t allowed to sit downstairs to watch movies when the building was the Carolina Theater. They sat in the balcony.
Ford, 35, comes to her work through studies in English literature, the history of consciousness, theater and the performing arts. She has immersed herself in cultural history.
“It was a long and winding road,” she said. Along the way, she worked with National Geographic in its film division, where she watched people making a documentary cut and splice film to create empathetic characters from the raw footage.
She moved to Los Angeles from Florida, where she grew up.
“The whole city is a movie set,” she said. When something happened in front of her, such as a car accident, she wouldn’t know if it was real or a movie in progress. When she walked her dog and came across a cliff that seemed familiar, she later realized that the cliff had been part of the scenery in Planet of the Apes.
“Living inside this breathing fiction,” as she called it, helped prepare her for her work in sound art. In her work in Winston-Salem, she will use her own brand of fiction to help listeners see the city through different eyes.
■ 34 x 52 x 40 will start at 6 p.m. Wednesday at The Garage, 110 W. Seventh St., as part of SECCA’s “Inside Out: Artists in the Community II” and the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival. Admission is free. For more information, call 723-7907 or visit www.nbtf.org.
■ Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)