Philanthropist Supports Bringing to Life One of the World’s First Black Operas

By Neil Armstrong

Photo contributed           Kamala-Jean Gopie, philanthropist and ardent supporter of the Arts

 

A Jamaican philanthropist is urging the African Canadian community to support the crowdfunding of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha,” one of the world’s first Black operas.

Kamala-Jean Gopie, a patron of the arts, has pledged $5,000 to the fundraising campaign for the production and has joined its Impact Team.

As someone who took on the Canadian Opera Company a few years at one of its annual general meetings about what it was doing to reflect the diversity of the community and to increase their audience, she was intrigued when she heard about “Treemonisha.”

In 1911, Joplin, a famed African American ragtime composer, wrote Treemonisha, the first opera about life post-slavery written by a Black person.

The fact that it was about the US Black experience and about women appealed to Gopie who said it filled a vacuum. “Treemonjisha” is a Black-women-led reimagining of Joplin’s work.

She said the opera has a universal appeal and this is an opportunity for people, including Jamaican Canadians, to look at their commonality and support the production “because it enriches all of us.”

Volcano, a Toronto-based live performance creation company producing the opera, says the budget for Treemonisha is $1.3 million and its goal for Toronto is to raise $150 thousand “to help plug the hole.”

“Fusing classical, folk, and gospel, it bore ragtime’s syncopations. Thematically, it was ahead of its time. But nobody would risk producing a Black composer’s work. Six years later Joplin was buried in a pauper’s grave and the work was thrown away. Now, reimagined with new libretto and orchestrations, Treemonisha lives again, “ says Ross Manson, artistic director of Volcano.

Volcano said this opera has the potential to change perceptions about many things, such as “intersectional realities, leadership, what progress looks like - even opera itself as a form that isn’t just for Europeans.”

 “For a great many people in this New World, and for me as a Black woman, this is a resonant story. And this particular story being resurrected now, at this particular point in history, is no small thing..,” said Weyni Mengesha, the show’s director.

Described as epic, the project brings together an international team of talented Black artists to honour the work of the ragtime giant. 

Photo contributed   Leah-Simone Bowen, co-librettist of Scott Joplin's "Treemonisha" which will be presented at Stanford Live in Palo Alto, California from April 23 to 26, and at Cal Performances in Berkeley, California from May 2 to 3.

Leah-Simone Bowen, who adapted the story and is the co-librettist, said when she found out that Joplin had written an all-Black opera with a Black woman as the lead character in the early 1900s, she was impressed.

“The story is essentially about an educated woman who leads her community and she’s a young woman,” says Bowen who was surprised because in his early days Joplin was a hit pop music maker. 

She said when Joplin wrote this opera he had to know that it was going to be a challenge to get it sold. 

“This was not the traditional way of hearing Black people sing at the time and so it’s such a revolutionary piece. That’s the reason it didn’t really get made while he was alive,” she said.

Bowen said the main conflict of the piece is essentially the educated versus the uneducated and the uneducated African Americans in this piece are connected to magic.

She said this is seen throughout history in the African diaspora – African American, people from the Caribbean – whether it is obeah, hoodoo or voodoo, those traditional practices were seen as evil “or seen as backwards or seen as something to let go so that you could appear more educated and more a part of the dominant white culture.”

This is what she considered when she was adapting the book to see “how can we look at this with 2019 eyes and ask the question of what colonialism and slavery did to traditional African practice.

“In the new version the people that do magic and practice traditional medicines aren’t seen as evil. That is the difference between the Joplin and the today and it’s very understandable why Joplin had the ideas that he had in that time period. In 2020, we can look at it a bit differently.”

Bowen said “Treemonisha” is about the remnants of memory and trauma, love and joy, but most of all it is about Black women and their extraordinary ability to survive. 

Not only did Joplin make Treemonisha the central character, he also included another major character, her mother, Monisha, who was her adoptive mother. 

She said the women in Joplin’s life were the figures that allowed him to be a musician. His mother was a former enslaved woman and while she was a domestic worker during Reconstruction saved some of her money to pay for his music lessons with a white German piano teacher.

Treemonisha has a lot of the same points of origin story as Joplin, said Bowen. 

“To me it’s a story of the women and the community wanting change, even though in the original actually the men have more songs than the women do, it really stood out to me.”

Volcano approached Bowen with this commission in 2012 so it has felt like a big part of her life “and it has just blossomed and grown.”

The opera was produced in a Texas opera house in the 1970s but since then there hasn’t been a major adaptation or a major revival of it.

“It’s been quite a journey and I think we’re all really excited that it’s going to be produced this year,” says Bowen, noting that it will be presented in Toronto as well but a date has not been scheduled yet. 

Treemonisha, which has a global cast of performers and creators from Canada, the United States, the UK and elsewhere, will be presented at Stanford Live in Palo Alto, California from April 23 to 26, and at Cal Performances in Berkeley, California from May 2 to 3.

[An edited version of this story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, January 16-22, 2020.]