Well, the Emery Bookclub Playhouse is ON! We’ve five excited performers who will step up to the bookclub stage in a couple of weeks to reveal their talent and share the poem they chose from the ever-popular book and movie, “For Colored Girls who considered Suicide when the Rainbow was Enuf”. We decided it would better suit the class to perform the poems instead of just reading the book and discussing it. This brings more life to the reading and adds a level of excitement to our experience together!
Why did we choose to perform the poems instead of reading each one separately? Well, don’t worry, the club members can always choose to read the entire book and some already have done so! I think the young ladies reading “For Colored Girls…” should answer that question. Performing brings a different part of the self to the forefront. It’s a way of deepening our connection to the characters. By performing some of the poems, we become those very characters, feeling their emotions and understanding why they feel so deeply and how they can resolve those feelings if and when they keep moving through them. We get to deepen our thoughts and feelings as we get closer to the characters. It’s almost like they give us permission to actually feel our own emotions about something we’ve kept repressed, fearing how to overcome it.
You don’t have to memorize the poems, just read them enough times, with enough compassion, passion and reasoning that you become one with the character. Make it real! Join us…
For the next two Wednesdays, our reading members will have their poems ready to perform. Each of the ladies represented in Ms. Shange’s book, was ascribed a color, i.e., “lady in red”. So, each of our young ladies is asked to bring some item, be it clothing, jewelry, a hat or cap, whatever the item it is to reflect the color ascribed their character.
And, just to get things popping, I’m posting Ariel Hughes’ poem in the next blog post just for your reading pleasure. The wonderful thing about poetry is that its up for interpretation, especially since most of us won’t get the opportunity to discuss the writer’s work with the writer. That’s why discussions can be so juicy; if we don’t have much to go on, we can just imagine from our own experiences what the writer actually meant. We’re lucky because we can always ask Ariel questions that arise when we read her poem.
Thanks, Ariel, for sharing your personal poetry with us!
SEE YOU ON WEDNESDAY RIGHT AFTER SCHOOL!!! (*_~)
We meet today at 2:15pm! SEE YOU THERE!!
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