Hallelujah North Carolina: From the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge - the Greensboro residency

Between and Whisper and a Song: Hallelujah
The Carolina Theatre, Greensboro, North Carolina
June 29, 2002

Greensboro’s "Hallelujah" was the last project in the multiyear initiative, presented by City Arts/Arts in Education of the Greensboro Parks & Recreation Department. With short production time, relatively few dancers from the community, almost no publicity, a small audience and the "Hallelujah" finale in Maryland tugging at the artists’ attention – it is surprising how cogent the project turned out to be.

The "Hallelujah" team of Michelle Pearson, Marvin Webb and Peter DiMuro discovered, in their community story collecting, that Greensboro (pop. 224,000) is and has always been a crossroads, and that became the theme of the new work. "What distinguishes the Guilford County seat," said Pearson in the program, "is the balance of those who’ve lived and thrived here, with those endless numbers of others who seemed to be in the state of transition while living here, or just plain living here as a transition." It is a theme the Dance Exchange works with often; they use their repertory piece about migration, "Still Crossing," to break the ice with many communities. The Michigan "Hallelujah" celebrated migration and the search for a home. The Los Angeles, Burlington and Minneapolis pieces talked about immigration to the U.S.

This performance traced the paths and roadways that have crossed the ground of Greensboro for centuries: prehistoric animals trails, a locally famous north-south Indian trading path, the country roads tramped by soldiers who fought at Guilford Courthouse and other battles of the American Revolution, the railroads’ "60 trains a day etching lines in the map" that still cross it today, the Underground Railroad smuggling slaves to the North, the trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement from the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins on South Elm Street in the 1960s, the journeys of immigration into the U.S. that pass through or stop in North Carolina. The piece was suffused with images of travel, people continually crossing the stage with backpacks and luggage, herds of dancers crossing in droves like cattle or buffalo. The travelers whispered as they moved, and stopped to tell stories of arrivals and departures, children going, parents staying, elders passing, everyone letting go.

Lullabies punctuated the movement and narrative as mothers tried to comfort their sleepless children, and adults remembered the comfort of their mothers’ songs in other countries. "In Hiroshima," said dancer Kazu Nakamura quietly from the stage’s apron, "there are two rivers running by the city, merging into one river. When Hiroshima was devastated, the rivers continued to flow. My mother said, ‘As long as the rivers continue to flow, there is hope.’" He followed this with a lullaby in Japanese. Music and dance from other countries wove their way through the stories. Second-generation Americans told tales of their tenuous ties to the old country through their grandparents, the ties loosening as the grandparents age and pass on.

As the piece wound to a close, dancers in white came to the edge of the stage to watch dancers in black rise in the audience, climb up on their chairs and dance in place, as if the whole piece had moved on, into the theater, into the bodies of the audience.

Participants in this residency were locals, people from nearby places and people just passing through. Among the cast of 90 were some 17 people from the local community, including a park ranger. Eighteen young people came from the Governor’s School, a summer program for gifted high-school students in neighboring Winston-Salem. The largest number of dancers were those imported from Pearson and DiMuro’s community- dance classes at the summertime American Dance Festival in Durham; they came from all over America. Included in the cast were three dancers who had appeared in "Hallelujahs" in Michigan and Raleigh. This was my first experience of the dynamic dancer Crystal Brown, a North Carolina performer with the African-American Dance Ensemble who was on her way out of town to become an intern with the Dance Exchange.

Nothing was more evocative of the theme than the participation of a handful of Montagnard refugees. Two weeks before their appearance in ‘Between a Whisper and a Song,’" they were living in a refugee camp in Cambodia. As I watched them observe and take part in the rehearsal, I marveled at the fact that one of their first experiences in the West was collaboration with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

"The ESL [English as a Second Language] program influenced the backbone of the piece," Pearson told me later, "but so many of them couldn’t come. They work at night, some of them are older. Working with them brought to mind the history of the Underground Railroad ferrying people to safety. That system, in a way, is still in operation. It is happening now."

The tragedy of the ancient Montagnard people of the highlands of Vietnam is a little-known consequence of the war in that country. By the war’s end, 85% of the Montagnard villages were in ruins or abandoned; of an estimated one million Montagnards, some 220,000 died. After the war, the Vietnamese government undertook to eradicate the unique Montagnard way of mountain life and replace it with Vietnamese culture. The population was relocated into new communities where their traditional ways of farming were forbidden, while their homelands were deforested and destroyed. Their language and culture are discouraged and many say they are facing extinction.

How this handful of Montagnard men came to be in "Hallelujah," I learned from their guide Kristian Holtgren, the ESL coordinator at Lutheran Family Services (LFS) in Greensboro. Each year LFS resettles in the Carolinas about 370 refugees fleeing persecution overseas, helping with location of housing, orientation to the community, employment, English classes, health screenings, medical check-ups and school placements, as well as help with immigration and naturalization. The LFS Vietnam Highland Assistance project offers aid to the Montagnard/Dega native peoples of the provinces of Daklak, Gialai, Kontum, Lamdong and Khanh Hoa. The project specializes in family reunification and cultural preservation.

Holtgren said artists from the Dance Exchange came to New Arrival School at Grace Community Church, where recent immigrants and refugees learn English. "I approached them and said the Montagnards are here and I thought the project would be an excellent addition to their cultural activity," said Holtgren. "We met the group and danced together. They liked the use of the idea of the Montagnards and their transition, coming to a new land.

"The different Montagnards changed," said Holtgren. "The two that are consistent are Y-Cahn – the Y means male, ‘male person named Cahn’ – and Thal, who had a love song. They’re using it as a song for children. It’s very beautiful and moving. They use the Montagnards as these people who are in between their past and future. They introduce each of them."

Holtgren said he is trying to learn some of the 51 Montagnard languages so he can find out more about the lives of the refugees. "They have been fighting for a long, long time," he said. "This last group, their fighting hasn’t ended yet because their wives and children are still left at home." In Vietnam, he told me, these men took part in a land-rights demonstration. "They have rich land in the highlands, coffee plantations. But the communist government wants the land to be communal farmland. There was a lot of clear-cutting going on. In fact the Montagnards are very surprised by Greensboro, to see all the trees, because in Vietnam, the trees are being cut down at a very rapid rate." Many of the men were arrested after the demonstration and thrown in jail. "They were told to write a letter to be sent back to their families, and then they went to a camp in Cambodia, and they didn’t have a chance to see their families again. Luckily they are here now being reunited with brothers and grandparents. We’re having such an influx, the numbers are so great. One man who fought for the Special Forces as a mortarman, he saw his grandson for the first time just last week and saw his son, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years."

Holtgren talked about his activities with the Montagnard men: "I take them to the library and for walks in the woods. Some just rode an elevator for the first time. I showed them all the art, we went and played ping-pong. I wanted to get them involved in this, to meet these people. We were welcomed. It’s been a wonderful thing. It’s hard to believe we’re performing. They are just making them feel real at ease. It’s nice because they feel so out of place." If ear-to-ear grins are evidence of ease, the Montagnards had obviously found a place in American art to be comfortable.

For project leader Michelle Pearson, the most influential participants in the Greensboro residency didn’t make it to the stage.

The immigrant women we worked with, I was really sad they couldn’t perform, but they informed the project so much. They all had night jobs, but they were at every single day workshop. They were the ones who would sing the lullabies, the fast, fast lullabies, and that reminded Peter of jostling a baby to sleep, as opposed to silently tiptoeing out of the room. That rhythm, like on a bus.

I think we knew they were a transient folk. There was Elga, from Ghana, with the filed teeth and the dark tattooing, and her daughter Anna and her granddaughter Rose, and then there was Priskilla, who was from Sudan, and one from Sierra Leone, one from Afghanistan and a group from Kosovo. The thing they could share was the lullabies. It was so lovely. It got to the point where we thought the teacher at their ESL school wasn’t going to want us to come so often, but she was like, "Come every day." I really felt they would inform the work and the project, even if they weren’t on stage.

It was exciting to see this piece in the gorgeous, ornate, 75-year-old Carolina Theater. Recently refurbished, and operated by the United Arts Council of Greensboro, it is a true showplace. But it was disappointing that more people didn’t have the opportunity to see the performance; the theater was less than half full. During the intermission, I overheard some audience members discussing the lack of publicity for the event, and their general impression that it was not well organized. In spite of this and all the other struggles involved with this last of the community "Hallelujahs," it was warmly received. Like all the others, the production was a kind of miracle.

As I sat in the theater listening to the applause, my mind ran over a quote I saw on a friend’s refrigerator, a little piece of "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll:

"There is no use trying," said Alice. "One can’t believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven’t had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Linda Frye Burnham is the co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2003