ČEŽNJA : BORN LONGING

The Kitchen Theater, N.Y., 2012

Abena Koomson Davis and Kristina Leko
With the participation of: Hettie Barnhill, Elana Bell, Zeljka Blaksić, Marcella Bonich, Mirjam Busanich, Rachel Busanich, Sarah Dahnke, Ivica Gasparić, Ivica Gasparić, Jun., Arijana Gasparić, Karma Mayet Johnson, Dara Lazar, Adam Matta, Syreeta McFadden, Caits Meissner, Lynne Procope, Kate Quarfordt, Allison Schlegel, Margaret Zgombic, Nori Boni Zorovich.

Čežnja: Born Longing, happening/performance, 85 minutes, featured a diverse assembly of New York-based female artists who staged their responds to the stories and songs contributed by members of the Croatian community from Astoria, Queens, N.Y. The feeling of a burdensome longing (čežnja) that constitutes migration experience, as found in popular Croatian American community songs, was our starting point whereas its interracial aspect was another core element of the project. It took four weeks of conversations and community events to create the final event, in which the two groups encounter one another physically and symbolically on the stage, in a mixture of documentary theater, prerecorded statements, live performances, poetry, beatboxing and a cappella singing. Croatian immigrants’ narratives along the immigrant narratives of artists, writers, poets, musicians of African American, Caribbean, Latin American, Jewish and other mixed origins grasped similarities and forged common grounds. Performed only once, on July 5th, 2012 the piece engaged audiences in singing and was highly emotional.

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Abena Koomson Davis and I were connected into our joint venture within the One Big City programming of CEC ArtsLink organization, which produced collaborative works by overseas artists from different NY diaspora communities, like me, and the NY-based artists from another diaspora community, like Abena, who was related to a NY Ghanaian community. Independently from one another, we both wrote complementing project proposals. As musician, Abena wanted to work with the Croatian community, because, while organizing her communal singing circles, she was never given a chance to access this community. On the other hand, I proposed a research on Croatian community songs in collaboration with an African American musician. Why?

While working on my Amerika project in Queens in 2002-2003, getting insights into the local Croatian community, into their customs and practices, and just as I was becoming member of that community and started to romanticize it, I became aware of the community’s mainstreamed racism. It happened while filming and researching typical US-Croatian diaspora community music, their nostalgic songs narrating migration. Because the normalized racism was a major cause of my traumatic culture shock in my first year in the USA, I guess, I wasn’t expecting to find it in my Croatian community. After observing a wider context, I learned about the role of Eastern European immigrants in structural support for systemic racism and white supremacy. That role has been based on the historical opposition towards socialist/communist systems and uncritical acceptance of the myth/spin of the American dream. In the process of integration into the USA society, white Eastern European immigrants (related to the Cold War dynamics which still persist in a way) have been continuously bribed (to some extend) by privileged white positions in order to, in return, support the status quo of white supremacy. Only a few will dare to strike and even fewer will be able to articulate the self-understanding of transethnic and transracial social solidarity and struggle (as Marcella Bonich in my Amerika project did). In 2011, I decided to address this issue and applied for a collaborative project with the New York Artslink organization which then connected me with Abena Koomson Davis, who applied with a perfectly matching project proposal. I suggested a project dealing with grief/longing in songs and festivals of Croatian diaspora in the US, but connected with the desire that our project act anti-racist within the community. Abena, who since years promotes singing practices as a practice of empowerment, solidarity and resistance in the African American tradition, and actively organizes singing circles in order to open a transethnic and transracial cultural space, was at the time just starting setting up her brilliant project of women and non-binary persons choir nurturing singing as a political practice.

The story line of our 85-minute-long theater performance is based on my AMERIKA project from 2002/2005, which featured five elderly Croatian immigrant women from Astoria, Queens, and their life stories. Now, four of them were involved in this performance. They all belonged to the generation that left communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s or early 1960s. In 2012, when I visited them again, they were ten years older, 87, 85, 80, 76. We filmed new material related to our theme of longing. We also worked with them and prepared them for their act on the stage, which they accomplished beautifully. They narrated, read, recited and sang. Abena and I established contacts between these women and three women writers, two of them African American (Syreeta McFadden, Caits Meissner, Lynne Procope), who, responding to these stories, wrote personal stories of their own, dealing with similar issues and histories. So, it happened that we were able to compare a small Croatian island depopulated in the 1960s with the island of Trinidad. We were also delving together into what it means to cross the Atlantic on a 15-meter boat with two kids on board in order to escape communism and revenge, and what on the other hand, might mean to cross the same ocean to lose one's freedom and history, and be forced into enslavement.

Our performance was a mixture of pre-filmed interviews and images and live performance. It also involved lots of singing with and among the audience, which was preceded by several song circles where Abena and her friends sang in the Croatian community center in Astoria. Lots of people cried during the performance. The audience was mixed, one third of it being members of the Croatian community. One small accomplishment of our project is that Abena and her a cappella group opened the next year's Croatian children's festival in New York, one of the most important cultural events in the Croatian community in the USA.

RELATED
The Kitchen Theatre, Abena Koomson Davis, Artslink

CREDITS 
Čežnja: Born Longing, happening/performance, 85’, The Kitchen Theater, New York, N.Y, July 5th, 2012. Directors Abena Koomson-Davis, Kristina Leko. Collaborating artists: Hettie Barnhill, Elana Bell, Zeljka Blaksić, Marcella Bonich, Mirjam Busanich, Rachel Busanich, Sarah Dahnke, Ivica Gasparić, Ivica Gasparić, Jun., Arijana Gasparić, Karma Mayet Johnson, Dara Lazar, Adam Matta, Syreeta McFadden, Caits Meissner, Lynne Procope, Kate Quarfordt, Allison Schlegel, Margaret Zgombic, Nori Boni Zorovich. Technic: The Kitchen Team. Curatorial/production team: Lumi Tan, The Kitchen, Zhenia Stadnik, Artslink. Supported by: CEC ArtsLink, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Cultural Office to the City of Zagreb. Photos: David Smithson.

GENRE&FORMATS
Project: participatory-documentary and communication art project; community project; oral history; project with specific social groups; social plastic; multimedia theater performance. Artwork/s and artifacts: encounters; singing circles; community events; video works, audio works; happening/performance.