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Performance Group Offers an Expanded View of African-American Culture

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The Civil Rights Act may be 25 years old this month, but such artists as Keith Antar Mason say that black youth today still ride the back of the bus. In fact, Mason thinks the prejudice is worse and the opportunities are fewer.

“The underclass is drowning,” the 32-year-old poet and director says. “Youths today no longer have the support mechanisms even I had. It’s that recent.

“By the time I was out of high school, (the) ‘reverse-discrimination’ (court decision) was settled and Reagan was there,” Mason says. “There were no remnants of the so-called Great Society.”

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That’s why Mason, Ellis Rice and Michael Keith Woods formed their performance company, the Hittites, in 1985. The troupe, which consists of a dozen members, wants to counter such social backsliding by staking out new territory--exploring the “African-American aesthetic” via experimental forms.

“Artists are a vital link in the Afro-centric community,” Mason says, apropos of his desire to inspire young people. “We can give substance and a gift of hope by showing our common humanity.”

The Hittites present “Love in the Park,” a “reappropriation” of Wanda Coleman’s “Buying Primo Time,” and “Night Commander” by Silas Jones--two works that address the disenfranchisement of black youth--at Highways, Saturday, Sunday, and July 15 and 16, directed by Mason.

“Both pieces have a social commentary aspect traditional to black literature--a concern with how black people view the future,” Mason says.

What’s not traditional is that Mason incorporates a wide array of dance and performance styles. This eclecticism is meant to dismantle preconceptions so the audience can join the artists in “voiding cultural stereotypes.”

It’s also a strategy intended to rebuild community. “Black youth is estranged from the traditional means by which we’ve cultivated community,” Mason says. “That’s why we have problems like drugs and gangs.”

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“Night Commander” depicts a young person who goes to the park and contacts extraterrestrials through his ghetto blaster. It speaks, according to Mason, about the paradox of “youth needing to learn history and yet rejecting it totally.”

One way the Hittites revitalize history is by casting their narrative in a provocative style--in this case, science fiction. Science fiction, however, isn’t usually regarded as the province of black artists.

“Science fiction is thought of as basically a white genre,” Mason says. “But actually some of the best comes from the Pacific Rim and the Third World.

“Scientific jargon has a certain relation to mythical realism, and the metaphor of the robot worker drones relates to (non-white peoples’) experiences.”

“We want to use this analogy of a frightening future--particularly an Afro-centric future--to reach disenfranchised black youth,” Mason continues. “It can provide insight and show how they can use these (stories) in their lives.”

They can, for example, find alternative role models.

“It has to affect their consciousness,” Mason says. “They see, for instance, that there is a black man on the face of the Earth who thinks reading is sexy.”

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And just as the audience finds strength in these new images, it’s also vital that the artists have the freedom to use whatever forms they please. “It’s important that black artists be allowed the same things as other artists,” Mason says.

“But theater limits black artists in that they can’t afford the lights, the big theater and so on,” Mason explains. “Usually a house doesn’t want to take a risk on a new black artist if it isn’t August Wilson talking about the ‘50s.”

“But that (kind of historical drama) is a turnoff to young people. A performance (context) provides a larger amount of freedom in which I can define what elements go into the ritual.”

Still, Mason feels the constraints of prejudice.

“It’s an uphill battle for black artists who want to deal with forms that are out of our tradition, such as modern dance. You can have a modern movement vocabulary in the piece, but people still come in expecting to hear drums.

“I have a larger culture than that and I don’t think I should limit myself,” Mason protests.

“You are going to hear African drums, but it’s to reclaim them as part of our tradition, not because they’re supposed to be there. And you’re also going to hear and see a lot of other things as well.”

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All of which Mason feels the black audience will welcome--as long as they can find where the work is presented.

“If you do good work, they’ll find you,” he says. “The problem is the media will not talk to black artists working outside of the traditional black things.”

“(The media has) this excuse of ‘you’re not traditional black, so where’s your audience?’ But that kind of (de facto censorship) is just as volatile as what the ayatollah did with ‘Satanic Verses,’ ” Mason insists.

“There’s more than one way to oppress an artist.”

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