Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesGeri Allen, seated, and Carrie Mae Weems working on their show “Slow Fade to Black.”
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: June 14, 2012
POINTING her camera, the artist Carrie Mae Weems lobbed directions. “A little more smoke!” and “Women, raise your mirrors!” she instructed the performers gathered recently in a black-box theater on the Lower East Side. Geri Allen, the jazz pianist and composer, sat nearby, scribbling notes.
Ms. Weems, known for photography and film projects that plumb issues of race and gender, was filming the Persuasions, four men tricked out in purple suits, in a flirtatious encounter with three female singers in regal black turbans.
“Trust me, love me, feel me,” the men crooned.
“Can I trust you?” the women cooed back.
“What happened to ‘No, no, no’?” Ms. Weems asked.
“It sounds great,” Ms. Allen shouted from the sidelines. “Just do more!”
Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems were creating images for a multimedia show called “Slow Fade to Black,” set to have its premiere on Friday at Celebrate Brooklyn!, the Prospect Park summer festival of performing arts and film. Marrying Ms. Weems’s images (on three giant screens) to original music by Ms. Allen, the show is among the festival’s 32 mostly free events, which began last week with the reggae star Jimmy Cliff and will end in August with the country singer Lyle Lovett.
“Slow Fade” is an unusual first-time festival collaboration for two African-American artists who tend to inhabit separate citadels of culture: museums and galleries for Ms. Weems, and concert halls and clubs for Ms. Allen. For this project the two will be joined by the Grammy-winning members of Ms. Allen’s trio, Esperanza Spalding, a bassist and singer, and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington.
Also part of the show are, among others, the tap dancer Maurice Chestnut; the singers Lizz Wright and Patrice Rushen; and Afro Blue, Howard University’s vocal jazz ensemble.
If the title “Slow Fade to Black” sounds familiar, it’s because it is the culmination of a project that began in 2010 and continued in 2011: a series of blurred, soft-focus photographs of famous black female performers like Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone and Marian Anderson. The title works in two ways, Ms. Weems said. The blurry photographs are a comment on the women’s receding from cultural prominence and the idea of a fade “to black” suggests a new generation of emerging black female artists. Many of the “Slow Fade” photographs will be projected while Ms. Wright sings on Friday. Ms. Allen composed a song to accompany the images.
“I first and foremost view this as an evening of music, centered on this idea of a woman’s journey, the span of a life,” Ms. Weems said recently as she and Ms. Allen dined in an Italian restaurant in the West Village.
“The journey is from your first feeling of emotion and love, the birth of your children, growing old,” she said. She and Ms. Allen are both in their 50s. They have known each other more than a decade and have worked together before.
Ms. Weems, tall and ebullient with a dash of curly hair, is perhaps best known for her 1990 project “Kitchen Table Series.” It deployed text and images to show a woman (Ms. Weems herself) sitting at the same kitchen table at various points in her emotional life.
More recently, her 2009 video project “Afro-chic” explored 1960s pop culture, concentrating on younger women. Ms. Weems’s 1995-96 project “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, is a layered work consisting of about 30 representations of African-Americans in the history of American photography. They are accompanied by text that explores the history from Ms. Weems’s perspective, creating a counternarrative to the way the images were often intended.
In the Celebrate Brooklyn! project, “the images will inform the performance,” said Ms. Allen, a soulful, post-bop pianist whom Ben Ratliff of The New York Times recently called “one of the more important jazz musicians of the last 25 years” and whose album “Flying Toward the Sound” made several “best of” lists for 2010. She is shorter and quieter than Ms. Weems, her face framed by locks.
While the overall structure of the show has been mostly sketched out, there will be plenty of improvisation as things get cooking, the women said. Sometimes the three screens will form a triptych or linger on Ms. Allen’s hands on the keyboard. Look for Ms. Allen and Ms. Rushen to perform a version of “Que Sera Sera” and for Ms. Allen’s contemporary arrangement of the spiritual “Oh, Freedom,” to be sung by Afro Blue. Images on the three screens will shift between video projections and the live action onstage.
The staged images of men and women that Ms. Weems created at the Lower East Side theater will be there too. They are intended as explorations of the nature of love, desire and female identity, examining women’s relationships to men, children and, most important, to themselves, she said. For example, the images show women looking at themselves and one another in mirrors or approaching a man who looks away.
“Will everyone in the audience pick up every nuance of the music or the images?” Ms. Weems asked. “Maybe not, but enough will, and we are excited about presenting this to an audience in Prospect Park.
“Geri is more introspective; I’m more visual and animated,” she continued. “I think those qualities are what we bring to the evening — the deep introspection on one hand, and this level of visual noise and visual sensuousness on the other.”
Ms. Weems, who is married and has an adult daughter, lives in Syracuse and Brooklyn. A single mother, Ms. Allen lives in New Jersey, with a hectic schedule that includes touring, caring for two teenagers (a third child is grown) and teaching music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The women mostly worked apart after an initial residency at Mass MoCA last year to jump-start the project.
It helped that the two had collaborated before. In 2009 Ms. Weems created an art film called “Refractions: Flying Toward the Sound,” which explored Ms. Allen’s life as part of a larger look at women’s lives. The film uses Ms. Allen’s composition “Flying Toward the Sound,” a concert-length piano suite with pieces inspired by Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. Ms. Allen wrote the piece while on a Guggenheim fellowship. In turn, Ms. Weems’s film projections accompanied Ms. Allen’s concert performances of “Flying.”
“Slow Fade” was commissioned by Bric Arts Media Brooklyn, the festival producers, as part of a mission that includes bringing artists not usually associated with free festivals to Prospect Park, said Rachel Chanoff, the artistic director of Celebrate Brooklyn!
Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems have been established artists for years but they continue to come into their own. The first major museum retrospective of Ms. Weems’s work — some 225 photographs, videos and installations — begins on Sept. 21 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
“In Weems’s video work the scores are an integral part, and this festival is a way for the viewer to have an immediate, all-sensory experience in an unexpected way,” said Kathryn Delmez, the curator of the Frist retrospective.
Ms. Allen, known for her collaborations, has worked with a glossy roster of musicians that includes Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden and Ravi Coltrane. Her new trio with Ms. Carrington, who is in her 40s, and Ms. Spalding, who is 27, showcases her with a younger generation. Ms. Carrington’s album “Mosaic” (with various artists, including Ms. Allen) was awarded the 2011 Grammy for best jazz vocal album of the year. Mr. Chestnut can be heard on the album “Geri Allen and Timeline Live, ” along with the bassist Kenny Davis and the drummer Kassa Overall, who will both perform on Friday.
Although “Slow Fade” begins through “the lenses of a black cultural experience, ultimately, it’s about the experiences of all women,” Ms. Weems said.
Mr. Chestnut, 28, speaking the other day, said, “I see it as just a celebration of this history — African-American jazz, tapping, as well as a tribute to women.”
At a recent rehearsal, at Ms. Allen’s suggestion, Ms. Weems read some Harriet Tubman quotations as part of the evening.
“I had no one to welcome me to this world of freedom,” Ms. Weems read in her husky, melodious voice.
Ms. Weems then told a story about how Tubman left her husband behind in one of her Underground Railroad excursions. Returning to find him with another woman, Ms. Weems said, Tubman simply asked the other woman to join her in escaping bondage.
Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems exchanged a knowing high five.
“Slow Fade to Black” is Friday night at 8 at the Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park West and Ninth Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn; $3 suggested donation; (718) 683-5600, bricartsmedia.org.
