The idea for this piece came from two mysterious sources. One was a memorably vivid dream I had about five years ago in which I was the solitary audience for a handful of wondrous underwater creatures as they performed vaudeville and jazzy burlesque numbers at a swank Art Deco resort at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean called the Saltwater Hotel. This dream image reflected, for better or for worse, my own personal construction of what the Harlem Renaissance looked, sounded and felt like.

The other source was my undergraduate theological studies of Haitian vodou. In the metaphysics of vodou, which has its roots in African soil from Ghana to Benin and yet is woven through with sturdy strands of Roman Catholic ritual and hagiography, souls migrate to a place “under the abysmal waters” when the body dies, and wait a year or longer, until family members perform a ritual of reclamation. Evidently this transition period is not easy, and the act of properly reclaiming a soul from the depths requires the involvement of an entire community in ritual practice. As dramatic as this process sounds, it exemplifies the deep value of, and connection to, ancestral tradition, as well as the active participation in the cycles of life and death, practiced by adherents of this tradition. Yet, the dazzlingly comprehensive religious imagination of Haitian vodou is sensationalized and even demonized in the post-colonial American zeitgeist; my travels to Haiti in November 2009, just before the earthquake, left no doubt in my mind that the story of vodou’s role in Haiti’s history as the first independent Black state in the colonial Americas was both achieved by and complicated by the power of this religion to transmit and preserve a cultural commitment to community, ancestral identity and resistance to oppression.

While visiting Port-au-Prince, I had the opportunity to visit the Hotel Oloffson, one of Haiti’s most famous sites. This “19th century Gothic gingerbread mansion set in a lush tropical garden” was originally built as the home of Haiti’s political Sam family, and has served diverse purposes ever since – from a hotel for visiting American and European cultural and political luminaries of the Twentieth Century to a US military hospital. It’s a crossroads kind of place that seemed to me a familiar dream image of what Haiti might look, sound and feel like, for better or worse, left to the imagination of a romantic traveler. With its rooms named after famous musicians and writers who have stayed there over the years, and its reputation as one of the city’s best musical venues, I couldn’t help but remember my earlier dream about The Saltwater Hotel.

The Saltwater Hotel will be an evening-length ‘folk opera’.  It will explore and bring together a few different themes through a narrative revealed in song, dance, dialogue and visual imagery: ‘underwater’ as a metaphor for the mysterious unknown (death, dreams, the unconscious, a stranger’s  ‘Otherness’) which scares us, but which is also an integral part of our shared reality; the ‘hotel’ as a metaphor for liminal or transitional states of being where we experience an expansion of our awareness or painfully confront our reluctance to do so; and the ‘performing arts’ as a metaphor for the complicated cultural relationship that we contemporary Americans – the descendants of those who profited by or perished because of slavery – continue to create, re-create, memorialize, mythologize and perform as we seek to make sense of our ideals of freedom in the context of our experiences of injustice.  I have already presented 10-15 minute works-in-progress excerpts of The Saltwater Hotel on the Music with a View series at The Flea Theater in 2008, and on New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival in 2010.

Songs:

Stella Maris Falls from the Heavens

A Wave in the Water

Song of the Lost Soul

My Hat Fell in the Water

Any Sailor Knows