Eutaw group to perform in NYC

By David Snow| Demopo­lis Times

Pub­lished Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 22, 2008

EUTAW — Greene County has a com­mu­nity the­atri­cal com­pany that not only serves its cit­i­zens, it has also been invited to per­form in New York City.

The Sto­ry­Tree Act­ing Com­pany is a the­atri­cal group begun by New York native Malik Brown and brought to Greene County to help extend cul­tural ties to the arts for the community.

“We started out teach­ing young peo­ple,” Brown said. “Then, we got adults inter­ested. My wife and I have been doing this for 16 years. We moved here in 1995, and then we started putting this act­ing com­pany together.

“We got this space gra­ciously donated to us by SCORE, which also does after-school pro­grams here in Greene County, and it has grown in its five years of ser­vice. It’s just a won­der­ful thing, our get­ting together with them, because I saw at the begin­ning the things that they were doing, and I thought that we could add our tal­ent to it.”

The Sto­ry­Tree Act­ing Com­pany will per­form at the East­side Institute’s “Per­form­ing the World” in New York City on Oct. 2–5, fea­tur­ing more than 150 groups from around the world.

“We’ll be per­form­ing vignettes,” Brown said. “One of them was from ‘Real Black Men Don’t Sit Cross-Legged on the Floor: A Col­lage in Blues.’ We’ll be doing a piece with Vassie Welbeck-Brown’s work, enti­tled ‘Talk­ing Drum Caper,’ which is talk­ing about the effect of the envi­ron­ment. We’ll also do a piece involv­ing Bessie Bizzell enti­tled ‘How It Came to Be Now,’ which deals with the bas­ket mak­ers and quil­ters and how our com­mu­nity came to be.”

“It also deals with the oral tra­di­tion,” Welbeck-Brown said, “the tales that are handed down from gen­er­a­tion to generation.”

The Com­pany hopes to move to a more cen­tral­ized loca­tion in Eutaw to allow more peo­ple to view or take part in their performances.

“First, we want to have a world-class act­ing com­pany, and I think we’re on our way,” Brown said. “The other thing we’re look­ing at in terms of space is hav­ing dif­fer­ent things come in. There is a lot of cul­ture in this area, and it wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily all be the­atre. We have a lot of quil­ters, we have a lot of bas­ket mak­ers. We’re look­ing at devel­op­ing into a cul­tural cen­ter in addi­tion to the­atri­cal performances.

“We also want to being in acts. For instance, Ella Joyce was in town doing her show called ‘A Rose Amongst Thorns,’ which was about Rosa Parks. We would like to bring in peo­ple like Ella Joyce or Ruby Dee in to do their shows for the com­mu­nity. It’s not just us.”

The Sto­ry­Tree Act­ing Com­pany has per­formed in Marengo and other area coun­ties, but gen­er­ally has per­formed along the Atlantic seaboard in New York and North Car­olina, among other places.

On Sat­ur­day, the com­pany was rehears­ing with the recita­tion of orig­i­nal poetry by its younger mem­bers, Mar­vin Adams and Mer­cedes Light­foot, as well as a piece from Langston Hughes’ “Emperor of the Muse,” which the com­pany per­formed before with The Demopo­lis Singers.

The com­pany plans a Kwan­zaa per­for­mance in Greene County in Decem­ber and will have an orig­i­nal per­for­mance for the senior cit­i­zens in May. The group will also per­form later this year at the Uni­ver­sity of West Alabama.

Soon, stu­dents from Para­mount Junior High School will go into the com­mu­nity to inter­view local civil rights work­ers and their fam­i­lies, and then write a play to per­form at the Rosa Parks Museum in Mont­gomery in February.

“We are tak­ing the art to help develop our com­mu­nity in what­ever way that we can,” said Welbeck-Brown, Brown’s wife and a native of Greene County. “Cre­ative arts have been a huge tool, not just for the com­mu­nity, but also for edu­ca­tion. We have a pilot project that we have com­ing up to teach self-structure and func­tion at the local high schools.”

“It has always been our pur­pose to incor­po­rate the arts into life,” Brown said, “not as some­thing sep­a­rate and elite. We want to incor­po­rate that into the fab­ric of the com­mu­nity in every­day life.”

A great part of the the­atre group, aside from the com­mu­nity mem­bers, are its youth mem­bers, who not only per­form but con­tribute through their own writ­ings, per­form­ing through their recitations.

“Mar­vin Adams is one of those folks who called me up and he wanted to act,” Brown said. “Mer­cedes Light­foot is from Sumter County dis­cov­ered us through a poetry writ­ing con­test, and she won a poetry award.”

The Sto­ry­Tree Act­ing Com­pany wants to serve the com­mu­nity through show­ing its per­for­mances and includ­ing the com­mu­nity within its per­for­mances. It takes the stage in schools in Greene County and has trod the boards in “America’s the­atre dis­trict,” New York City.

It is part of help­ing a com­mu­nity grow cul­tur­ally not only through teach­ing but also through involv­ing its cit­i­zens in the cul­tural arts. In essence, it, too, is about hand­ing down sto­ries that can be shared from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion and tap­ping pre­vi­ously unseen tal­ents to bol­ster the com­mu­nity aware­ness in the arts.

More infor­ma­tion about the Sto­ry­Tree Act­ing Com­pany can be found at the Web site http://stco.artshost.com or by writ­ing to storytree321@hotmail.com or by call­ing Brown at (205) 372‑3711.