Sounding the Gospel Play

Abstract

There is no gospel without its proclamation. Not merely “good news” sealed and delivered, gospel is testimony enacted and performed. By extension, gospel music, an art form that originates in Black American churches and in the experience of the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, instantiates the biblical Gospels as a religious tradition that is at once oral and scriptive. Through its performance, gospel music embodies new conditions of biblical interpretation and belief for a modern American audience. If this music is, as Braxton D. Shelley has put it, a “means by which to make one’s way through the world,” then the sound of gospel—with its characteristically kinetic, participatory musical textures and its soaring, enveloping feel—offers a roadmap of spiritual and social transformation, encoding “an expansive genealogy of sacred expression” that draws upon nineteenth-century Christian revivals and Afro-diasporic religious practices.1 The shimmering afterglow of a gospel sensibility ripples through a range of contemporary theatrical performances, from Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf to the Afrofuturist ritual stagecraft of Daniel Alexander Jones’s drag alter ego, Jomama Jones. Yet for all that gospel music has embraced high drama (in its dizzying vocality, its raw testimonials, its melodies that billow like the voluminous robes of a choir), drama has not always returned the embrace. Gospel has had a particularly uneasy relationship to contemporary experimental performance, in that the discontinuous, iconoclastic aesthetics of the latter seem inherently at odds with gospel’s soulful intensity.