IDA 2022
June 11
Jill Brown Rhone Park
371 Massachusetts Avenue
Central Square, Cambridge
The performance of IDA 2022 was supported in part by Cambridge Arts and the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
IDA 2022 was an outdoor performance that highlighted a text from Ida B. Wells’ 1910 essay, “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching.” The project was conceived by FTPC co-artistic director Deborah Lake Fortson.
The action: IDA enters. She’s walking purposefully, getting back to work at her desk, pencil behind her ear. She sits, looks at a notebook, corrects something, puts paper in the typewriter. Types. When she’s finished, she takes the sheet of paper out of the machine and hands it to performers in contemporary dress who take the text and chalk this text excerpt from her essay on the sidewalk. Two women, a woman of color and a white woman, enter arm in arm and survey the chalking. They wear 1918 pandemic dress, with scarf-masks attached to their hats. Events unfold from the encounter of these characters and the unfolding of the excerpted text, which begins:
The beginning of Ida Wells’ essay in Original Rights Magazine, vol. I, no. 4 (June 1910). Source: Black Women’s Suffrage Portal, Ida B. Wells Barnett Papers
“With no sacredness of the ballot, there can be no sacredness of human life itself. For if the strong can take the weak man’s ballot, when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also.”
Performers:
Sydney Grant
Candis Hilton
Amy Merrill
Juliet Pepe
Taonga Ruwe
Abria Smith
Wanda Strukus
Susan Thompson
Amy West
Danny Gessner: Stage Manager
Heidi Hermiller: Costume Designer
IDA 2022 grew out of work Deborah Fortson and actors began two years earlier in preparation for “Is It a Crime to Vote?” a video supported by Mass Humanities. As they were reading the essay by Wells that talks about lynching, George Floyd was murdered. Fortson and another performer chalked 14 lines of Wells’ text on Somerville sidewalks in fall 2020. In the winter of 2020–2021, FPTC members joined the IDA group as collaborators: stage manager, producers, performers, and graphic and text consultants. The group chalked text in Dorchester, Brookline, and Cambridge. In spring 2021, two performers from Central Square Theater joined the project.
Two women out for a walk during the 1918 flu epidemic
Participants rehearsed in spring 2022, experimenting with movement variations, establishing the moments of contact among performers. The style emerged through experiment, allowing for the probability that actions may change during performances as performers interact with spectators.
Postcard handouts to the audience provided more information about Wells’ essay and her life.
IDA 2022 was designed to encourage audience members to discover for themselves what the text talks about. This was not an historical drama or dead-and-done history. It talked about entrenched attitudes and horrifying events that destroyed people’s lives in the past—and that continue to do so, daily sabotaging the soul and the future of our communities and our country. Wells’ courageous words speak to what is happening now. We believe that their unexpected force, encountered in a walk in the city, will give spectator’s access to their own courage, persistence and resilience.