Bill T. Jones brings “Fela!” to Broadway.
“Fela!,” the musical, directed by Bill T. Jones, that opened Off Broadway last year and just reopened, at the Eugene O’Neill, begins with Fela Kuti, the father of Afrobeat and, in the nineteen-seventies, one of the most popular musicians in West Africa, performing in his club, the Shrine, in Lagos. This will be his last show there, Kuti says. His native Nigeria has become too dangerous for him.
Fela, as he was known, was born to a prominent family. His father, an Anglican priest, was the headmaster of a school and the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. The mother was a campaigner for women’s rights, and two brothers became distinguished physicians. Fela, seemingly to balance his family’s respectability, became a club musician (composer, saxophonist, keyboard player), a political activist, and a martyr. In his twenties 
and thirties, he spent time in England and the United States, picking up various musical influences—jazz, funk, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, James Brown. He returned to Africa and fused those elements with African rhythms, thereby inventing Afrobeat. In the U.S., he was converted to the Black Power movement; his song lyrics attacked his country’s vicious military government. This endeared him to Nigerians but not to their leaders. In consequence—and also because of his generally irreverent behavior (he liked to perform in his underpants, smoking a joint)—he was frequently arrested. The fiercest attack came in 1977, when soldiers invaded his commune, the Kalakuta Republic; assaulted many of the people living there; and set fire to the place, which housed his recording studio, with all his master tapes. In “Fela!,” one survivor reports that soldiers carved their initials into her buttocks. Another says they “pull on my private thing, until it bleeds.” Most crushing to Fela was that his elderly mother, whom he revered, was thrown out a window. She died soon afterward. That is when Fela considered leaving Nigeria. In the end, he stayed. He died there, of AIDS, in 1997, at the age of fifty-eight.
Read more: Bill T. Jones brings “Fela!” to Broadway : The New Yorker
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v3JQHckvSU-MTW_OOdaS3TiHKVn9ObwhJ3IDqZWh8er68LMxqDPhSsAJGpBPKGqHrKAr0BNjctqv1rXrvz2rQ_kOk0R9RoR16E8n8aC69fKVUJ6Nm0Ck-TDqYS4ttiScNTku_z9A42WvQiEzpeCtE=s0-d)
No comments:
Post a Comment