Episode 7
To be Anna Madah and Emma Louise
Episode 7 Transcript
Hey Y’all! I am so excited to be back. We had a slight break due to some scheduling difficulties two weeks back, but I’m excited to be back to share the final two episodes of my first season. I feel completely grateful to have been able to create what I have so far, and for the positive reinforcement that has come from this community I am a part of, and through those of whom I get to know now, because of this. It’s overwhelming and wonderful and I feel grateful.
Now, no matter how wonderfully grateful I feel, your girl needs a bit of a break. Some Time to read, create, chill with friends, and adventure a bit. Season 2 WILL be back, and I’m excited to share some future collaborations which will look like other presentations of this project! Thank you for going on this ride with me! I am looking forward to the future, to learn and share important lives and stories, and new realizations that I hope to have and that I hope you have too. Now let's get into it.
TERM DROP
Spectacular Opacity: A term created by the author Daphne Brooks who wrote Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom. Within this term she creates a lens to view black performance art. “As opaque, as dark points of possibility that create figurative sites for the reconfigurations of black and female bodies on display. A kind of shrouding, this troupe of darkness paradoxically allows for corporeal unveiling to yoke with the re-covering and re-historicizing of the flesh. Dense and spectacular, the opaque performances of marginalized cultural figures call attention to the skill of the performer who, through gestures and speech as well as material props and visual technologies, is able to confound and stirrups conventional constructions of the radicalized and gendered body… “ This cultural phenomenon emerges at varying times as a visual obstacle erupting as a result of the hostile spectators' epistemological resistance to reading alternative racial and gender representation.
We have seen a similar thought process in Episode 2 where I spoke of the life of Amelia Tilghman. The primary researcher of Amelia Tilghman, Josephine Wright discusses the life and career of Tilghman, being centered around activism as a means to teach the public both white and black about the possibilities that could engender black life. That black life does not need to be a caricature, to be made fun of, or an assumption of one way of existing, but worthy and beautiful in many varying ways of existence. This idea of looking through a lens of spectacular opacity, is a term that I think will follow us as we look to many black female artists at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a term of ownership of the self which I think is an exciting way to consider art during this time period and beyond, for all marginalized.
LET’S MEET THIS WEEKS QUEEN
The Heyers sisters, Anna Madah and Emma Louise were born in California during 1855 and 1857 respectively. Both were vocally trained first by their parents, then Hugo Sank, and finally completed their training with the famed black opera singer, Josephine D’Ormy. It was with her they finalized their early training. She taught them Italian, German, and stage presence. They are mentioned in a few books during and after their time for their excellent skill at their young ages, for they began to tour with their father at age 10 and 12, seen as prodigies. James Trotter and M.A. Majors, primary research discuss these sisters in great detail. Trotter quotes many newspaper articles throughout their United States tours, each of which seem to bring forth an idea, surrounding those who heard and spoke about them, that would slowly become an accepted American norm, for black performing artists.
“The writer recalls with much pleasure the delightful emotion which, on one of the evenings alluded to, were awakened in his breast by the very graceful stage appearance and the divine harmony produced by these accomplished musicians; for when not thrilled alone by their music, so faultlessly, so sweetly rendered, he could not repress the thoughts that come forcibly into his mind, of not only how much these noble artists were doing for the cause of our music, but for that other righteous one,-the breaking-down of a terribly cruel prejudice, founded on the accident, so to speak, of the color of the face.”
Emma and Anna had enormous amounts of support before and after they launched their early careers in 1867 (mind you, this was two years after the civil war) when they were ages 12 and 14. Emma and Anna had their first concert performance in the Metropolitan theatre in San Francisco. Their father acted as manager, and ensured them safe travel to this concert, and for the rest of their concerts as this successful first performance would send them touring across the States. In concert they were lauded for not only their interesting and exciting vocal performances but for their dramatic abilities that Madame D’Ormy worked to cultivate in the girls at a young age. “The Heyers Sisters manipulations of their oral sound and their audience's reception of it in combination with their corporeal identities, created an opaque performance event onto and into which audiences and critics could read a myriad of possibilities for the performers artistic capacities and socially constructed identities.”
After their San Francisco debut they would travel to Salt Lake, where Deseret News would write extensively about them, and then to New York and then eventually Boston. We also see their prolonged stay in Boston, at the end of their teenage tour, to be of particular importance. Their Boston tour was slightly different from their tours in other places like New York. During that time Boston was known as a place that was rather hostile to new talent and musicians and artists would tend to avoid Boston as a means to not receive bad reviews, and have those reviews negatively affect their career. Understanding this, Emma and Anna and their father planned to connect with the Bostonian public through its elite. They met at one of these elite society members' homes, and through critical assessment, an assessment that was ensured would be just as difficult as one given to white people, would be given, and the girls would glowingly pass, and go onto take Boston by storms. Their reception ended up being so positive in Boston that Emma and Anna would prolong it. They connected so well with the culture, community, and education, that all they wanted to do was take a part of it while they could. It was this stay in Boston that would help direct them to the way they would eventually end up spending their lives working on. Performance on the dramatic stage.
The Heyers sisters were so revolutionary because they predated the most world famous black singer, who we have come to know as sisseretta jones. They were never to be famous and reaching like sisseretta jones, but their work set the stage for a space in between the minstrel show, and high brow art. They created a space in between to share the lives and emotional stories of blacks that suffered through slavery, and the misconceptions of blacks during that time. They did this through acting. An important step in this part of their career would be their creating a musical troupe called the Heyers sisters company. This was created as a way to maintain their performing career financially. This company would allow the Heyers sisters to begin their work redefining black characters seen in Mistreslsy. They would perform in uncle Tom's cabin, reclaiming the narrative. They would both participate in the first dramatic work that was performed by blacks to portray topics of enslaved experiences, entitled Out of Bondage. Both of these efforts put on by Emma and Anna have worked to offer new voices in common troupes, to allow for space for more than just minstrelsy or European art, but something that was claimed and for black peoples in particular. The Heyers sisters in all aspects of the life we still have available to us, were revolutionary, fascinating, and seemingly lovely human beings.
QUESTIONS FOR OUR QUEEN
Could the work of the Heyers sisters initially, be considered as activism when they weren’t choosing their career it was being chosen for them?
I was considering the idea of activism and when action is activism versus happenstance. Given Emma and Anna’s fathers role in their lives as tour manager and primary decider of most things, at first I saw Emma and Anna having to move within a space that is primarily patriarchal. Therefore without much freedom of voice or choice towards activism. How could the girls both have been choosing activism, when nothing I have found of their lives, offers their primary voice? Later in life, specifically after they concluded they’re youthful tour in Boston, I see a direct stand within activism in their art. But no proof of the activism the time before that, that is of course, until I considered the concept of Spectacular Opacity. Emma and Anna, just being where they are, and being who they were, and given all the places that they resided, and the barriers that they broke for people like Sisseretta Jones, that was activism. Because even within solely patriarchal structures, they were shaping minds to perceive new things of the black female body. Their existence was activism and then when they found their voice, their art and bodies were activism.
