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It was June, which in St. Louis could mean the air felt either sunny and antiseptic or like acrylic quilt batting soaked in swamp water. No one took note. But it has been recorded that the artists brought in spotlights, instruments, costumes, scaffolding, and more than 200 chairs. And they brought more than 20 of themselves: actors and dancers and poets and musicians, assembling under the shadows of Pruitt-Igoe’s 33 slablike buildings, where residents were in the midst of a rent strike. Curious people descended the stairs—or rode skip-stop elevators—down to the ground floor and outdoors, where the Black Artists’ Group performed its keystone work, Poem for a Revolutionary Night, for the first time. Based on Larry Neal’s poem of the same name, it braided together theater, dance, poetry, free jazz, and rear-projected film, an alchemical mix of genres that was BAG’s trademark. It was epilogued by Vincent Terrell’s bread-and-puppets theater piece on the rent strike, Now Hear This (which gave the audience a chance to boo and hiss City Hall). Three years later, BAG dissolved as members left for New York and Paris; Julius Hemphill, who scored Poem, became a core part of New York’s jazz loft scene. Before he departed, he recorded his first record, Dogon A.D. Hemphill’s 1995 New York Times obituary stated that without that album, most of the jazz and new music of the late 1970s and early ’80s “would not have existed”—yet it’s been out of print since 1977. Forty years after that revolutionary night, the world’s still hurting for that kind of poetry.
Dancers rehearsing for Poem for a Revolutionary Night. Photograph courtesy of Portia Hunt; photographer unknown. Special thanks to Ben Looker, author of “Point From Which Creation Begins”: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis (2004, Missouri Historical Society Press).
