Sharon Bridgforth
Flame - Fall 2006

Sharon Bridgforth is the Lambda Award winning author of the bull-jean stories (RedBone Press), and love conjure/blues a performance/novel published by RedBone Press. Bridgforth is an Alpert Award Nominee in the Arts in Theatre, her work has been anthologized and produced widely and has received support from the National Endowment For The Arts Commissioning Program; The National Endowment For The Arts/Theatre Communications Group Playwright in Residence Program; National Performance Network; Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Award; and Funding Exchange/The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media. Bridgforth is the Anchor Artist for The Austin Project, sponsored by The Center For African and African American Studies (U.T. Austin) where she teaches a course on Black Empowerment and Community Internships.

www.sharonbridgforth.com

Sharon Bridgforth, author/performer/activist
Interviewed by Ana-Maurine Lara

What are some defining moments in your younger years that have had a major impact on who you are today? 

I was born in Cook County Hospital.  The first defining moment was when my mother decided to move from Chicago to Los Angeles. I was three.  So actually we were evicted. And on the day that we got evicted my great aunt & uncle were visiting and we got in the car with them and ended up in L.A. `cause that’s where they were living. During that time period black Americans had migrated to many places from the South and in L.A. there were a lot of black people from the South. Walter Moseley does an incredible job of documenting that time period [with the Easy Rawlins series].  My mother would have been one of those people in that time period that he writes about in that Los Angeles.   

I grew up in South Central L.A. and even though it was L.A. it was very much like living in a little southern town because all the black Americans were from the South. So the sensibilities and the protocols, so to speak, had a southern tint to it.  I knew one black American person from L.A.. Everybody else was from somewhere else. And their parents particularly were from somewhere else.  I didn’t know other black kids that were born there.  So that says a whole lot.  But us moving to L.A. meant that I grew up in L.A. – my mother raised me with her having a certain kind of hope for having a better life. The promise and possibilities of sunny Southern California and the hopes of all the other, her peers had, too, kind of colored the experience of being there.  And it was fun.  

I grew up taking the bus to get to where I needed to be, from a very young age. So as I went through school my bus ride got longer and longer `cause I was going to school further and further away. Eventually for high school I went to school in Echo Park. From South Central to Echo Park was a two hour bus ride. The languages, the sensibilities, the protocols, the music, the food, the smells changed drastically from neighborhood to neighborhood.  I experienced the world and it was magnificent. I think it had everything to do with how I see myself and how I imagine and hope for the world to be.   

[Being in L.A.] also created in both my mother and I a sense of mourning for home. That there was not a sense that this is our home. It was more a sense of “this is where we’re going to make it.  We’re here and we’re going to do better because we’re here.” So a sense of longing. A sense of displacement to some degree. A sense of loss, a sense of grief and all of those things later became really important in my writing.  

And then I think for me the next huge thing that comes to mind at the moment is that I spent summers in Memphis, so I did get to go to the home place.  I went to kindergarten and first grade in Memphis and I went back almost every summer until I was a teenager. So being able to go and connect with the big family and to be inside of what was home and to be the spoiled one inside of all that was really important.  I learned how to tell stories from being in the room with them. I was able to be grounded in a sense of family, the sense of blues as a way of life, who we were and what our stories were.  

What does it mean for you to be an artist – a writer – in the world? 

Well for me initially I started doing it just because I had to. It was like breathing. I’ve always been a reader. When I was a kid I just read voraciously. When I was 15 I started writing just trying to survive my own emotions. [Then it was in] reading the Songs of Solomon and Psalms and I just thought they were so pretty, that I saw writing as something that could be transformative for me emotionally.  And somewhere along the way, probably around the time I was in my early 30s it all clicked together.  Now what I can say is that writing is what I’m here in the world to do. It’s my gift that I have been given.  It’s what I can contribute. I see it as a spiritual responsibility; I see it as an ancestral calling. I see it as a privilege. I see it as a way for me to honor not only the reality of my life and experiences, but those who came before. A specific thing I have been given is the opportunity to tell the stories of the ancestors and to keep their voices alive.  I see it as service.  It’s what I’m here to offer in service to the ancestors, to the orisa, to the universe, to humanity and to my own destiny.  So I take it very seriously. 

How would you say your work is influenced by who you are? 

What I know now is that life and art are not separate.  As you know, my work lives in a Jazz aesthetic, so it is all about the work being work of spirit and work of spiritual revolution.  The place you work from is from inside your own self, so everything impacts and informs and dictates what I write, how I move through the world with it, how I get to the next moment.  And that includes all of the influences, so: my ancestors, my family, my community, my mentors, the people I mentor and my life experiences.  Each moment contains everything and determines how the next moment unfolds. 

How do you define success as a writer and artist?

That is a very important question.  I had to tackle that question some years ago.  What I came to is that this is my life, so it is not about the next gig, the next published thing.  It is not about money and awards.  It is not about who I get to walk with.  This is my life.  And on top of that it’s part of my ancestral legacy, so I am being given their stories.  I have the responsibility of their influence as I move forward.  So what I have to do is create a life that nurtures and supports and provides opportunity for me to do what I’m here to do.  When I do that in a way that is healthy, that, to me, is success.  When I create a life that allows me to have quality time with people and to take care of my health and to have joy in my work and to fully realize my artistic projects and vision, that’s success.  So how I’m living is a reflection of my success.   

I had gotten to a point of burn out—and this was probably in the mid-nineties— working with the Root Women Theater Company.  We were touring and it was wonderful.  We had so much fun and we went so many places.  We were doing very well.  It was quite an amazing thing.  I was exhausted to the bone all the time.  I realized that I was always living in the future.  If you’re touring, you send stuff out and you start having conversations about things that are going to happen in a year or two, the same with grants and mounting shows.  So I realized that I was always in the future.  I wasn’t even in the present moment.  I wasn’t able to do everything I needed to do to keep the tours going and write to my full capacity.  Once the dust settled and I figured everything out I realized that first I had to create a life based in the present moment and it had to be a life of health and joy and love and abundance and creativity.  And it had to be based on the fact that I was writing.  So as soon as I did that then I got the publishing deal with Lisa C. Moore (Redbone Press), which was the thing that I wanted anyway.  That was what I really wanted.  

Could you say some more about your work?  

I’m proud of what we did with Root Women.  I think we were very successful in what we set out to do and in what we did. It was critical and it was also experimental in terms of the discovery of what it was, but it led me to the people that knew. And then eventually I was able to work with Daniel [Alexander Jones], and I worked with Dr Joni Jones the whole time and eventually Laurie Carlos directed one of my pieces and then everything changed. And then, I became the writer that I was capable of being.  

I first started working with Laurie in 1998 and it was a process for me to learn what I needed to learn; I see it as a mentorship process. In Jazz you are mentored by walking with, so by just being at her side, by having her direct my shows, by being able to talk with her and hear her and see her work - that’s how I learned. It was in 2002 that the break happened for me. That’s what Dr Jones calls it – she calls it the break. She’s writing about the jazz aesthetic and right now she’s talking about the break. It’s a Legba moment. You literally break open and you have a divine opportunity to make a choice about how you’re going to move forward with your work. And so you can either do what you know or you can go into the unknown, which is more scary, more rigorous, and more dangerous in many ways and of course that’s where you get your chops - when you take that road.

And so luckily I took that road. And ironically it was a piece I was writing about being on the bus in Los Angeles that that happened in. The piece is called Conflamma and Laurie directed that piece. I got a Theatre Communications Group/National Endowment for the Arts grant as a playwright – I got $20,000 and all I had to do was write and it was the first time I didn’t have four jobs and write. So I used that TCG grant to write Conflamma. I did my residency at the Old Frontier at Hyde Park theatre when Vicky Boone was artistic director; they produced the show and Laurie was the director, Dr Jones was the dramaturg and Florinda [Bryant] was in the show.  It was just incredible. But we did it initially and then I did a reading of it that Dr Jones directed and then I did it again with Laurie at Penumbra Theatre Company – an equity show. By the time we finished that production, I finally finished the piece. Laurie worked with me that whole time and just basically broke my ass down.  She worked me, and she worked that piece and she did it with love and respect and fierceness and at the end of that process I got it.