About No Strangers Here Today
My Quaker great-great Grandmother, Elizabeth Conard Edwards, kept a diary during the Civil War, from January-July 1864, a litany of daily life on a farm in southern Ohio, fifty miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I discovered this tiny treasure doing research on "originality," the mining of original sources for creative inspiration. Her delicate handwriting recording the "now" of her life, the clear pictures she painted in a spare language inspired me aesthetically. And even more, history became personal. Elizabeth Edwards' diary opened up a big story.
Coded diary entries, referring to strangers (Quakers called fugitives from slavery travelers and strangers) indicate that she and her family were a link in the Underground Railroad, the mysterious, clandestine network between free blacks, Quakers, and anti-slavery abolitionists. At great personal risk, this bi-racial grassroots resistance movement, which started sometime in the 1700's and lasted until the end of the Civil War, pushed the cause of freedom for the four million enslaved African Americans to the center of national policy.
No Strangers Here Today is a 70 minute performance work -- a duet between movement artist/writer, Susan Banyas, and jazz composer, David Ornette Cherry -- which tells the story of these times through images, spoken word, music and movement. Elizabeth Edwards' diary entries are the heartbeat of the story, evoking imaginative detail of place and time, her motherly concern for her son, a soldier in the Union Army, and the quietly coded references to her political and spiritual activism. Primary family documents, memories, and historical research are woven together with elegant music and movement compositions to create a lively, expressive record of a powerful period in American history that is important to remember in our own troubled times.
The message of the Underground Railroad affirms a committment to uphold human rights and oppose economic, political, and personal tyranny by the ruling elite. Early doctrine of the Society of Friends (Elizabeth's ancestors arrived in the new colonies in 1683 to escape religious persecution in Europe) is clear. Friends opposed "The binding character of authority," declared that war was "incompatible with Christian spirit" and that "slavery must be eradicated." No Strangers Here Today is a call to end conflict and aggression against people of color nationally and internationally and connects the dots, as the Quakers did then and now, between war, power, and oppression. The work is created in solidarity with the vision of grassroots connection and is a call to action.
- Susan Banyas
No Strangers Here Today was originally produced by SO&SO&SO&SO, Inc. and performed at the The National Underground Railroad Freedom Centerin Cincinnati, Ohio ("Borderlands" Conference, University of Northern Kentucky), the International Society for theStudy of Time Conference("Time and Memory") in Cambridge, England, in Los Angeles through ALOUD LA at the Mark Taper Theatre, commissioned as a duet between Ms. Banyas and David Ornette Cherry for a repeat performance, and in Portland, Oregon at Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. The New York City premier is produced by La Mama E.T.C in association with SO&SO&SO&SO.