Gwyn Gilliss
A close-up of Quanda Johnson.
Quanda Johnson is a doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theatre studies at UW-Madison.
What seems like a lifetime ago I interviewed Quanda Johnson for a profile. When I say a lifetime ago I mean March 6. Remember March 6? We talked for an hour at Michelangelo’s Coffee House — in person, unmasked. COVID-19 was “over there” in China, Isthmus was publishing a weekly newspaper. George Floyd was alive.
I was timing the piece to run around the time that Johnson was appearing in a live event, An Evening with James Baldwin, produced by a local group, Fermat’s Last Theater Company, at Memorial Union’s Play Circle. Like everything, that event was canceled soon after the interview.
With hindsight, I can see that the pandemic was closing in. Did we know, on some level, that everything was about to change?
Johnson, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theater studies, was a spectacular interviewee. I was impressed with her experience and her clear-eyed description of the challenges of being a Black artist transplanted to Madison. She is a polymath, seamlessly shifting between academic research, writing, singing, activism and poetry. In her hands, the lines between these areas blur.
Luckily, Johnson is in transit from her home in New York City, and we have another chance to see her work her magic. On Aug. 13, Fermat’s Last Theater will be presenting a pandemic-style version of Another Evening with James Baldwin. The performance is being performed and livestreamed by Cafe CODA and includes Johnson singing three Negro spirituals and reading several of Baldwin’s poems. Another local standout, Melvin Hinton, will read Baldwin’s prose and share stories from his encounters with Baldwin in Paris and Madrid. There will also be dancing by UW’s Akiwele Burayidi and music by bassist Oliver Gomez.
I first encountered Johnson at a 2018 women’s theater conference organized by another UW-Madison phenom, Sandra Adell. The Philadelphia native was performing excerpts from her doctoral theater project, gut-wrenching narratives from enslaved women in the Americas. She wore a colorful turban, and her voice filled the classroom. She was, in short, a force to be reckoned with.
In early 2019 she blew the roof off Memorial Union's Shannon Hall, playing Jack’s Mother in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, a co-production of UW-Madison’s opera and theater departments. She is a Broadway veteran who was in the original cast of Ragtime and performed with the late great Carol Channing in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! She has three master’s degrees, is a Fulbright Scholar, and is working on her doctorate in interdisciplinary theater studies at UW-Madison.
She’s the kind of person that UW-Madison — and Madison at large — is lucky to have in our midst. And yet, within one week of landing here from her home in New York City, she witnessed an ugly racist incident on State Street.
As part of the current national conversation about systemic racism, Johnson penned an eloquent opinion piece for the Aug. 1 edition of the New York Daily News. She calls for a federal apology for the harms of slavery (no such apology has ever been issued), traces her lineage back to an enslaved woman born in 1781, and recalls the 1916 lynching of a relative in South Carolina.
What follows are excerpts from our comprehensive interview, edited for space and clarity.
You play a key role in Fermat’s production of An Evening with James Baldwin. Tell me about your work with that project.
Fermat's Last Theater is an incredible opportunity for those of us in the performing arts to have a chance to do “the work” of both creative making and activism. I'm very excited to have teamed up with [production manager] David Simmons, to credit and spotlight James Baldwin. It is also very timely, very necessary. He is a voice that needs to be elevated, a challenging voice, dealing with a lot of triggering information that people resist. He uses the N-word, which became a bit of an issue with our last performance. There was some pushback because of the use of that word, but he uses it strategically. He never uses it casually, or in a way that is not pregnant with integrity.
So, you leave it in.
We do not censor James Baldwin. The important thing is to let the audience know that these triggers do exist in the work. And this is a warning: Be aware when you come to this, you’re coming to sensitive material. I have a chance to read his poetry and sing Negro spirituals — these are spirituals crafted by Black people in the fields of slavery. Genius gestating and creating art under immense oppression.
These songs had a special purpose.
When I say genius, I don't say it lightly. These songs were encoded messages crafted by persons not allowed education or academic musicianship. They are the enslaved Africans’ sorrow songs, used to communicate sadness, uplift, or warn of impending escape — all of these things.
In your doctoral work you are also elevating the voices of enslaved people, for example the piece I saw at the women’s theater conference.
The excerpts were from a new piece that I’m researching and writing: I Know My Robe Gonna Fit Me Well; I Tried It On at the Gates of Hell. It's a quote from a Negro spiritual. It pops up in a lot of 20th century gospel songs as a chant, or as a refrain. I remember hearing the old women in my grandfather's church singing this refrain. As a hook it latched on in my psyche.
It is a great title.
It looks at the Black female voice in Atlantic slavery, a voice that has been virtually invisible. There are a lot of slave narratives in the archives, mostly Black male voices. Very few Black female voices had agency to write their narratives: Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. But for the most part, the Black female voice in the Western Hemisphere has been silenced when it comes to chattel slavery. That story has been told for her by others. So, I wanted to find first-person narratives, either written directly, dictated, or culled from the archive: wills, escape notices, court records. I’m thinking particularly of Marie-Joseph Angelique, who was a Portuguese-born African woman who had been traded through the Netherlands and then to French colonial Canada and became the scapegoat for the burning of Old Montreal.
I remember that one.
Yes Marie-Joseph Angelique. A woman who was brutally tortured by the French, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., paraded through the burned-out section of Montreal, hung, then cast on a pyre and burned until even her bones turned to ash. The master executioner was told to fling her ashes to the four winds — the master executioner was also a Black slave, Matthieu Léveillé. People do not want to talk about these things. They're painful, they're guilt-ridden. But unless we talk about them, we're not going to heal.
That is a huge project. Is that something that we could expect to see here?
Believe it or not, I'm closer to being finished than even I anticipated. I have representative voices from both the French and British Canada. I have three voices so far from the U.S. I need to find a French Caribbean and a Spanish Caribbean voice. And then I need to find a Portuguese and a Spanish voice from Central and South America. So, I’m more than halfway there.
What is the thrust of your dissertation at UW-Madison?
My focus is the African diaspora and performance as a means of activism. It's three components, beginning with long-form poems that are accompanied by performance confronting psychological trauma, hegemonic violence, and their ramifications on the black domicile.
That is an amazing distillation of kind of everything that matters right now. And I can see from your history that you're not afraid of biting off more than you can chew. Can we talk about your unusual path to this point?
I went to school on an engineering scholarship, initially. So, my undergrad is kind of a mixture of engineering and economics. I was in the process of losing a parent, and her dream was to be at my graduation. So, I switched majors midstream so I could get out on time; she was fading fast. My mom was at my graduation, and died a few months later. I got off of the hard science track.
You don't hear about people in arts with that kind of background.
Mom had told me when I was 15 that I was an actor and she didn't mean it condescendingly. She wasn't being facetious. There was something she wanted me to do, and I told her that I couldn't do it. She said, “No. You won't do it, but you could because you're an actor.” That was the first time that term was ever used in relationship to me. It was a seismic shift in my consciousness. Still I went on, received a chemical engineering scholarship to the University of Delaware, and thought that would be my path. After she succumbed, suddenly I'm in limbo — one foot in childhood, one foot in adulthood, trying to figure out my future. It was then that I recalled my Mom telling me that I was an actor.
And you are also a writer.
I wrote a lot of poetry from grade school age. I had a grandfather who was very nurturing. He pastored a huge church in Philadelphia. He would call me to the front of the congregation to recite poetry.
How old were you when you started to do that?
I must've been nine or 10.
That sounds intimidating.
That kind of got the performance juices flowing. I could stand up; my knees might be knocking. My voice might be shaking, but eventually performing became routine.
And then after your mother died you dove into performing.
I connected with a woman in Philadelphia named Vivian Dow, a Black woman. She was an expert in visual art and a member of the Barnes Foundation; she was also an actor and director. She taught theater and art at a parochial school in Philadelphia. Since I didn't know what to do, a friend of mine said, "You know what? Vivian is looking for an assistant. Why don't you go and assist her?" And I did. It was incredible, life changing. Vivian told me, "You have some talent. Have you ever thought about studying acting? Get Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and read it. There's a role, Beneatha. She has some long speeches. Learn one; memorize it. And, I'll help you with it. Then I want you to go to the Walnut Street Theatre School and audition." Carla Belver, of People's Light Theatre Company, taught their master class. When class ended, she said, “Quanda, you have some talent. Why don't you go to New York?” I told Vivian, and she packed me in her little car with two bags of belongings, drove me to New York. And I've been there ever since.
How old were you when you got to New York?
I was about 23, 24 years old. I attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. And that was my start. The program was a year; I started auditioning as soon as I finished. I did children's theater. Then went to Europe to understudy the star of a production called Josephine — the life of Josephine Baker. This was a two and a half hour show where, as understudy, I had 11 songs and 31 costume changes. At least seven major dances. I performed the role three times. The final time was before an audience of 2,000. I was the last person to bow. When I came downstage in this gorgeous red dress, the entire audience stood. I literally staggered back a bit and I thought, "Oh, I'm in the right place. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."
It’s an incredible feeling.
I auditioned shortly after for the Houston Grand Opera production of Porgy and Bess and traveled the world. I performed three seasons with the New York City Opera. Did a couple of Broadway production contracts. I had the privilege of doing the last performance of Hello Dolly! with Carol Channing and performed in Ragtime on Broadway, joining the original cast.
That’s already an impressive resume, but you kept going.
Unless I was doing Ragtime, I didn't see anyone who looked like me. So, what to do? You can't stand third girl from the left, or be the token Black female, and not get bitter and frustrated. So, I started creating my own work.
That’s where the master’s degrees come in.
I had always written, so I continued writing. I went back to school and got my MFA to learn the inner workings of theater, how to talk to actors, how I wanted to be talked to by directors. I was able to carve out a niche for myself and find out who were the movers and shakers in the world of African American theater, the predecessors who came before and those currently working. Next, was my master’s in music degree from the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College. This taught me how to communicate to singers and sharpened my musicianship. I wanted to immediately go into a doctoral program in Africana studies, which did not work out. Instead, I ended up with a Fulbright and three master's degrees, my third being in Africana studies as a Gallatin Academic Scholar at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
And where did that work take you?
My Fulbright took me to Nova Scotia where I studied the Atlantic Black Canadian experience. I culminated my time by researching the unique Africadian experience and championing the community through an original work, Beyond the Veil of the Sorrow Songs. The Black people of Nova Scotia were in many ways as marginalized as Black communities in the United States. Canada has a mythology that it is the place Black people escape racial oppression. It's not a place where Blacks or Indigenous people were/are oppressed. And yet there are areas in marginalized sections of Nova Scotia, where Black communities did not have the infrastructure for flush toilets, street lights, etcetera, until the 1980s. It's a Black community; therefore, it's not a priority.
So, what is freedom, right?
If Canada's the promised land, and that's what freedom looks like, what is freedom? Beyond the Veil of the Sorrow Songs gave Africadians an opportunity to tell their own chronicle.
That brings me to Madison, which is a community rife with disparities. What is it like to come here as a Black woman from New York City, doing the work you are doing?
For years our country has been fraught with racial tension. From 2012 and Trayvon Martin’s assassination, to our current time. We thought electing a president who was in Black packaging meant that we had arrived as a culture, that we were indeed that "City on a Hill." We thought that the hard work was done, and we were finally a post-racial society. But Barack Obama's presidency became a lightning rod — the trigger that reveals and unveils everything that has always been there. People of all races, ethnicities and identities were ecstatic when he was elected. But just as his win was a catalyst for joy, it was also a catalyst for an unreasonable fear. "What have we done? There is a Black man in the White House."
When I arrived in 2018, I was walking down State Street, towards the Capitol, and I hear these two young men accosting an Asian young man with very derogatory language, referencing his genitalia. I mean, horrible language. One crosses the street and comes close to my left side. I turn quickly, because I've heard what has been taking place. I felt too uncomfortable to intervene. Shame on me. It was my first week here. So, he comes up close, puts his face in mine and says, “Yeah! I'm a racist bastard!” and then laughs and runs. His buddy crosses and runs after him.
You'd been here a week.
I had been here a week. I don't know if these were students. I have a very sneaking suspicion that they were, but I thought, "Where am I? This is the Berkeley of the Midwest? What is happening?" I was gobsmacked.
So where do we go from here? How can UW-Madison and Madison become a more inclusive, welcoming place?
What has to be understood is that things are systemic, so the rooting out of harmful entrenched ideas has to go deep. And that’s expensive. It makes demands on time, talent and treasure. There is a cultural shift that has to take place so that students who arrive feel that they have the right to stay. This is a feeling they must receive from the administration, faculty and their fellow students. For undergrads, particularly, there should be a class that deals with cultural difference, and every freshman should be required to take it.
How do you address these issues in your teaching?
The course that I'm TA-ing, English/Theater & Drama 120, allows me to teach in conjunction with my focus. I include Black playwrights, spanning three centuries, equally male and female. Through the plays, we address many issues. My students from last semester, to a person, said this was new information. As faculty, we have agency as to how we present the material, as long as students receive the skills required. We can do more to further the conversation, to elevate our students, to elevate their humanity, to elevate their consciousness, so they become aware that there are people who do not experience the world as they do.
