Watch Night by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Watch Night by Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Sonja Arsham Kuftinec

WATCH NIGHT. Co-conceived and libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Co-conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones. Music by Tamar-kali. Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York. November 12, 2023.

Where are we? A marbled cube of cultural life in lower Manhattan, Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) rises luminous and opaque across from the 9/11 Memorial site. There, in the footprints of the Twin Towers, two voids sink into concrete through layers of trade history. That memorial, Reflecting Absence, is designed to stop business-as-usual, to prompt meditation on collective loss. Yet the memorial, alongside the genre-defying performance of Watch Night that took place in November 2023, prompts difficult questions. Whose violent deaths do we choose to remember and how? For PAC NYC’s inaugural season, Artistic Director Bill Rauch commissioned choreographer Bill T. Jones and spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph to create a piece that reckoned with racialized violence. Rooted in multiple perspectives and genres, Watch Night wrestled with conundrums that refuse easy resolutions.

In its very title, Watch Night pays homage to a dialectic of enslavement and liberation. The historical Watch Night, New Year’s Eve 1862, anticipated emancipation, marking both prophetic release and weighty reflection. Jones and Joseph’s composition draws on these energies while inquiring still further into the nature of forgiveness and redemption amid Super/Natural energies and a shifting Echo Chamber Chorus. In this way, Watch Night resists easy categorization. In part, the piece reflects on the dual tragedies of racially motivated slaughter in sacred spaces: the 2015 murder of congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Yet Watch Night is not a documentary account. The congregations are fictionalized, and we are led through the events of the piece by a flawed Black Jewish journalist as well as a lone white Wolf. The dramaturgy moves forward in time while also being pulled into memory. Scenes split, echo, repeat. There are beats of story as well as percussive pulses of energy. Ostinatos and choreographic returns. Jones defines himself as a postmodern artist, concerned less with narrative cohesion than with the rigorous play of ideas in a form that embraces classical opera, everyday movement, and displays of hip-hop-inspired virtuosity. Joseph is a spoken-word artist who self-identifies as a “code surfer” rather than a code-switcher. In his libretto, references to the “Parable of the Sower” point to the Book of Matthew as well as to Black futurist author Octavia Butler. When these artists dance together, perspectives multiply. Locations keep shifting.

Where are we?

I was disoriented before even encountering the stage. The Perelman spaces are designed to be redesigned in over sixty possible configurations with no clear center. Guided by cheerful docents, I moved up a string of narrow stairs into the Zuccotti Theater, stepping over torn fragments of newspapers and flyers for rallies. The ripped headlines foretold not just an event, but the act of storytelling itself: What makes the news? How is it arranged and reconfigured? The stage setting (designed by Adam Rigg) felt congregational yet nonspecific: sacred space sketched in outlines of red neon windows backing an audience divided by a bare wooden stage. The space felt open yet looming. Custodians entered, sweeping up the newspaper and flyers. The lights dimmed, and the Custodians opened into song—a haunting lament that ripped through the space. It was now I who was swept away. In the program notes, composer Tamar-kali refers to the body as a vessel for sacred sound. But the voice of Ken Alston, Jr. moved in a soprano range that didn’t seem to fit his towering physique. I was again disoriented. Awed. Where am I? In a grief that seemed at once to riff on the Bible and Coltrane: “a hate supreme.”

Watch Night incorporated a variety of storytelling modes: spoken-word riffs, scenic dialogues, arias, dance movements—often juxtaposed. Characters were introduced in ways that are direct (Josh the journalist) as well as social and poetic: a pastor (Winters), a teacher (Ms...