page 50, Short List: Main Event
"Perhaps – if my hands was a big bad jazz band – there would be no vicious, evil and cruel death on the avenue," recites Vanessa Germanb> in one of her signature spoken-word pieces. "'Cause I would send my fingers flying in a furious hurricane of eighth notes, right into the faces of any slick-tongued, gun-toting mamma jamma who would come to steal my brothers' breath."
The artist and educator performed the poem – barefoot – at last year's PopTech, the prestigious Maine gathering of thinkers and artists. Among fellow presenters including sould singer John Legen, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell and another acclaimed Pittsburgh-based artist – performer and choreographer Bill Shannon – German drew a standing ovation. Indeed, she's lately popular continent-wide, delivering her passionate, socially engaged work at such venues as Boston College's Center for Corporate Citizenship conference, and scoring an invite to this fall's SNAP! leadership conference in Boulder, Colo.
Back home in Pittsburgh, on June 6, German premiered a version of her one-woman show, Testify, on Garfield's streets during the Art Cubed festival, attracting passersby and even a guy who offered to back her up on guitar.
The full-length production of Testify, which debuts June 20 and 21 at Downtown's Harris Theater, is a multimedia work built around interviews German conducted with people touched by violent crime: victims, perpetrators, criminal-justice professionals and more, including a woman whose sons were both murdered.
"She talks about how she forgave these men who shot her sons," German says. German was also inspired by children she's taught in recent years, including Native Americans in New Mexico, Garfield charter-schoool students and kids at area housing projects.
Testify is part of both the Pittsburgh Biennial and the Three Rivers Arts Festival. (Another sponsor, the New Hazlett Theater, hosts additional dates in late July.)
The show's visual components address particularly the soaring Black homicide rate in America's (supposedly) Most Livable City. But Testify is no lecture.
"The piece is really about the power of stories to shift culture," German says – how new ways of resolving conflict, say, can grow from "perspective engineering" of our stories. "I look at the inside of the story and say, 'From the outside it looks like this, but maybe from the inside it looks lilke this."
– Bill O'Driscoll