The dimly lit performance hall pulses with a
quiet beat. Men and women wearing their best “I just
can’t help looking cool” attire make their way around
the room — walking, talking, moving with the rhythm. At each
table, a single candle illuminates the faces around it, and in this
light, everyone looks good. This is a place to see and be seen, to hear
and be heard. This is Expressions in the Dark. A vintage hipster steps to the microphone.
Poised in a black leather beret and matching jacket, he hushes the
hissing chatter from the crowd with his smooth voice. For five
minutes, the man leads the gathering on a trip from
lightheartedness to heartbreak — a roller coaster the crowd
will ride many times this evening. One by one, performers take the stage. Some
are so good that the audience trades in tired snaps for all-out
wails and standing ovations. A few are so bad that the erratic
clapping that greets their efforts shows the spectators’
generosity. One woman recounts the act of making love so
sensuously that the crowd erupts in search of a cold shower. This is a poetry reading? William Shakespeare
would roll over in his grave, and maybe he should. Shakespeare was
never one to miss a good party. EITD draws a crowd of about 100 through the
doors of the Club Room at the Hoogland Center for the Arts on the
first Friday of each month. Patrons pay a $10 cover charge to
attend these spoken-word events, and they bring their friends when
they return. With modest press coverage and minimal advertising,
EITD — now inching toward its second anniversary — has
used word of mouth, a long e-mail list, and the unique synergy of
its three founders to grow into the quietest little artistic
success story in Springfield.
It’s difficult to describe an
EITD event. Tony Muse, also known as DJ Tone, brews an organic stew
of hip-hop, soul, old-school funk, and R&B, but EITD
isn’t a concert. You can get beer, wine, or a mixed drink at
the bar, but EITD isn’t a club. Some of the artists address God, but EITD
isn’t church. Will Mitchell, a Springfield poet and longtime EITD
regular, says that the happy medium is one reason for the event’s
ever-growing popularity. “In my experience with Springfield, you
can either go to a club or bar, or a church,” Mitchell says.
“Expressions in the Dark provides an in-between social
activity that people can do.”
Mitchell caught the buzz on his first visit.
He came planning to watch, but the energy of the room and the poets
performing there inspired him to sign up for the open-mic segment.
The list of performers is growing; 15 to 20 artists are performing
each month now. Many EITD regulars are seasoned practitioners of
the spoken-word craft; guest artists are sometimes nationally known
on the quasi-underground spoken-word scene. What is spoken word? It is the dramatic
performance of poetry — but it’s not as simple as
reading the words from the page. Dr. Marcellus Leonard,
poet-professor of English at the University of Illinois at
Springfield and an EITD performer, says that the origins of spoken word can be traced to
Africa, where orators called griots memorized tribal history. The
griot’s job was to recite the story to anyone who requested it. “Recitation was a kind of mnemonic
device to help people to remember important details, but it also
became an aspect of . . . relating religious concepts and
doctrines, folklore stories, and, eventually, entertainment,”
Leonard says. “If we leap thousands of years and come even to
the point of slavery, we find a lot of these exciting stories and
folklore coming with the people to the United States and being told
even among them as they were slaves.”
The civil-rights movement has given birth to
such poets and speakers as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, H. Rap
Brown (known for his rapid-fire speech), Don Lee (later known as
Haki Madhubuti, a great poet of the 1970s), and the Last Poets.
These performers have inspired the genres of hip-hop and spoken
word, which continue to mesh and influence each other even as they
flourish on their own. “I think rap has given rise to spoken
word, which is something entirely different from rap yet is still
associated with it,” Leonard says. “Spoken word does
not depend on a soundtrack or outside rhythm; the rhythms are
incorporated into the words themselves.”
Spoken word has been a major component of the
African-American underground art scene since gaining mild
popularity in large cities during the early-1990s and, later, some
mainstream success with the introduction of HBO’s Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam. Some people have the talent; some people
don’t. “I think I can make the comparison to
singers,” Leonard says. “There are people who just can
sing and haven’t had any formal training and people who have
had a lot of training and know exactly when to hit the beat and
know exactly what note and just don’t have the voice.”
Expressions in the Dark has a
similarly diverse ancestry. In January 2004, Ben Hale, 30, began
hosting an open-mic hip-hop event, the Holla Back Jam, at the Funny
Bone. When he moved the event to Club 217, Hale enlisted the help
of Dwayne Bess, 27, an Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brother of
Hale’s from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and a
recent Springfield transplant. Although the Holla Back Jam drew
decent turnouts, Bess says, “We were sort of losing
money.”
The pair decided to take a chance on bringing
the spoken-word concept to Springfield. Sound crazy? Not to these two. Both Hale and
Bess had been writing and performing poetry for years. Hale started
composing verse in the early 1990s and, in 1996, headed for
Atlanta, where he joined a group of poets and started performing
spoken word. His style shows an obvious hip-hop influence, and
Hale, the son of a preacher, notes, “There’s obviously
going to be spirituality.”
Bess wrote poetry for two years before he
began performing it in 1997. He started an event in St. Louis
called Feel the Vibe and, he says, developed a real passion for it.
When Bess and Hale first joined forces, the
events were more of a financial endeavor for the former and more of
a community-building venture for the latter. “I think the great thing within the
first six months of Ben and I working on the event . . . we
actually sort of traded principles,” Bess says. “When I
saw that people were interested in [spoken word], when I saw that
this was something they have a hunger for, it makes you react and
say, ‘Yeah, this is why I’m doing it.’
”
Ditching the Holla Back Jam moniker in favor
of Expressions in the Dark, the pair moved the event to Stella
Blue, an upscale club in downtown Springfield that made a
better-spoken word venue. One night in September 2004, Kimberly
Moore wandered in. Moore, 36, a Springfield native, had been
traveling to St. Louis for three years to participate in that
city’s flourishing spoken-word poetry scene. When she heard
about Expressions in the Dark, she went to Stella Blue, where she
was surprised to find Hale, an old friend, in charge. Moore had
been trying to bring St. Louis poets up to Springfield to present
shows. Moore talked with Hale, then Bess and Moore got together for
lunch, and she was hooked.
“Through working on something that she
wanted to work on, we sort of sucked her in,” Bess says.
“We sort of stole her away form her own ideas — and,
you know, before you know it, she was connected and started doing
some of the public relations and marketing with us.”
Moore was the final piece Hale and Bess
needed to take Expressions to the next level. Now they had a team
that covered all the bases. Hale, a self-proclaimed numbers man, enjoys
working the business angle. Bess handles the logistics of the
events. Moore takes care of the marketing because, as she puts it,
“I know everyone and their mama.” With an e-mail
invitation list of more than 500, she can get the word out with
just a few taps and a click. “We’ve never been in the
newspaper, we’ve only been on the radio because we purchased
advertisement, and we’ve only done that like twice,”
Bess says. “Everything has been on [e-mail], fliers and word
of mouth. When you take a look at it though, the marketing scheme
we have set up does work.”
Ensconced at Stella Blue, EITD began drawing
poets from Bloomington, Decatur, Peoria, St. Louis, and Chicago
— even Atlanta — to share their talent and to network.
But then one Friday EITD found a new home
because Stella Blue was double-booked, Moore says. With just hours
to find a space, Bess looked all over Springfield, and around 1:30
p.m. he found an open spot: the Club Room at the Hoogland Center
for the Arts. Moore, a claims analyst at the
Teachers’ Retirement System, hustled to the Hoogland after
work to get the place looking sharp by 9 p.m., when the crowd would
start rolling in. “Everyone we heard that came [that
evening] said, ‘Oh yeah, we like this better,’ ”
Moore says. “[The Club Room] had the New York feel, the
Chicago feel.”
Since December, nearly all EITD shows have
been held in the Club Room. The Nov. 4 show will take place at
Northfield Center, in conjunction with the UIS Hip-Hop Symposium. When the three promoters sat down to put
their goals for Expressions in the Dark on paper, their lists
looked similar: All were seeking bigger, better, more ambitious
shows. They’re experimenting with theme shows after
successful evenings of all female and all male performers, dubbed
Ladies of Expressions in the Dark and Men of Expressions in the
Dark, respectively. They’ve got plans for Expressions Back in
the Day (an old-school night) and Expressions Inspired by Grace (a
spirituality-inspired evening). “We want to do something different to
get more people, more ethnicities. It’s a diverse crowd of
people and it’s a diverse crowd of poets, even though the
majority of them are African-Americans,” Moore says.
“I’m, like, ‘I know there are more than just
black people who do poetry.’”
In addition to spoken-word events, Moore,
Bess, and Hale hope to offer more events like A Mother’s Cry, a play
written and directed by Joel King that the trio presented this
summer. “I think Springfield would really enjoy
a larger-scale production if they bought into it,” Bess says.
“We’ve given them a taste of it; we’ve gotten a
following; people know that spoken word and live music is out
there.”
“[Our crowd] grows every time we have
the event,” Moore says. “This is the thing that really
blows my mind: We have our regular people, but we have a different
crowd every time we have a show.”
At one EITD show, the audience gets
everything from the profound poetry of Dr. Leonard to passionate
rhymes about home and Mother, police and racism, gangs and God, sex
and hip-hop. One poet sings a poignant ode to New Orleans. A girl
group performs a radio-ready dance tune. An older white woman belts
out a Whitney Houston song. Oliver Jackson, a Decatur poet known onstage
as Ambitious, presents a spiritually inspired freestyle performance
in a rapid-fire delivery that suggests the origin of his stage
name. The self-proclaimed “aggressive angel warrior”
performs around the state but says that Expressions in the Dark is
one of the best spoken-word events he has attended. Another performer, the Rev. Carey Grady of
St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Decatur,
steps onstage for only the second time and delivers a few
slice-of-life stories about family. He says he heard about
Expressions from a friend and enjoys coming out for the clean vibe.
During some shows, Bess and Moore act as
onstage hosts, Moore playing the role of a calming, nurturing,
sometimes scolding mother, and Bess working the crowd with his
playful demeanor and dapper good looks. Moore may sing a bit as she
introduces the next guest; Bess, clad in a sharp suit, may recite
verse he’s composed with refrigerator magnets. Hale stays
busy offstage, working out the kinks of the show as it unfolds. Most participants perform either spoken word
or poetry, but hip-hop also has its place. “Hip-hop artists are more than willing
to come to the poetry, and they have — this is not a
shoot-’em-up bang-bang type of thing,” Hale says.
“If you want to talk to the ladies, you can do that —
but if you are not bringing anything uplifting, it’s not the
venue for you.”
Aside from that caveat, everyone who makes it
to the mic gets love. EITD’s vibe is nothing if not
nurturing. “I’ll tell you this right now:
You are not going to get booed,” Hale says. “In the
worst-case scenario, there will be dead silence, and that’s
definitely not going to happen because you always have a few people
clapping.”
Sometimes a performer gets unorthodox
positive feedback: At the October event, the woman warbling Whitney
Houston looks out over the audience and sees a sea of swaying cell
phones, held open and aloft by their owners to send her a wavy blue
glow of approval. “For the most part, [the audience]
pumps you up. They do because they know it’s hard to get up
there and get up in front of somebody and do your thing. We have
professional people that do this all the time that get up there and
mess up,” Moore says. “They’re, like, ‘Wait
a minute, let me start over,’ you know, and it’s OK.
People say, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK — do your
thing.’ ”
After each event, Moore sends out an e-mail,
asking patrons what they liked and thanking them for attending.
“I thank people because they don’t have to support
us,” she says. “I don’t even know the words to
say about how I feel about Expressions and the things that we can
do for Springfield,” Moore says. “Getting the word out
— that’s my thing, just to let people know that
we’re here, we’re doing this thing, and people are
loving it.”
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2005.
