Prometheus 6   

Poet Tracie Morris Looks Ahead to the Past
May 14 - 20, 2003

We're five minutes into the future, or maybe a lifetime. The calendar seems indeterminate here. Poet Tracie Morris and choreographer David Thomson walk slowly heel to toe, as if following a white line down a road they can't see. Morris begins reciting from the script she calls a poem collection: "When the buildings split, the big ones, lots of things went with them. Like: luck."

Afrofuturistic had to start with 9-11, "an event that was cleaving," Morris explains later. "It felt like the axis tilted in a way. Because now the world is off." That isn't sci-fi.

And her piece is no star trek. It's about the future inherent in the present, the potential utopias and dystopias-mostly the latter. Morris plays Sirena, a black woman who finds that every time she goes out, the world is different, and every time she comes back, so is home. Her activities include attending an environmentalist meeting, encountering a lynching tree, and working as a student on behalf of the wealthy. In Sirena's world, affirmative action is dead and black people go to college indirectly by accessing classes online and taking tests for rich white people.

Same old "war of the worlds." That's the Afrofuturistic theme.