The Sistrum Lansing Women’s Chorus will honor the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution with a pair of concerts later in January.
The Suffrage Contata will open the performances.
Chorus Artistic Director Meghan Eldred-Woolsey says the work is by fellow MSU alum Andrea Ramsey.
“She was getting her doctorate while I was getting my master's [degree], and so I’ve known her for a really long time,” she said. “They premiered this work at Carnegie Hall, and since then, I’ve been really interested in performing it.”
Eldred-Woolsey says the piece tells the story of the suffragette movement from a number of perspectives, including from women of color like journalist and sociologist Ida B. Wells.
"The second movement is almost all of Ida B. Wells’ ideas, and it goes all the way back to Susan B. Anthony," she explained. "It’s sort of a historical context, but it’s also really personal, and a lot of talk about what it is and how important it is that we have this right to vote, and that we exercise that right to vote as well."
The theme of the concerts, “Keep Marching,” comes from the show-stopping number in the Tony Award-winning musical Suffs. Sistrum will include the song, which was sung on Broadway by Alex Newell.
The Lansing-area collective of women poets known as Voices of the Revolution will also provide narration in the shows.
It marks the first time the two organizations have collaborated. Member Tari Muñiz says her selection for the concert, Poem for South African Women by June Jordan, commemorates a protest against apartheid in 1956 by tens of thousands of women and children.
Poem for South African Women
June Jordan
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world
The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire
And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for
The second half of the concerts will be made up of protest songs about protecting voting rights and demanding equality like Wild Embers by Melissa Dunphy.
The crux of Wild Embers, according to director Meghan Eldred-Woolsey, are the lyrics: “they should have checked the ashes of the women they burned alive."
"The idea is that there have been women that came before us that we are on the shoulders of, and we’re continuing to build upon what they left off, and even if they didn’t finish what they started, we can continue to go on in that same way," Eldred-Woolsey said.
Sistrum’s Keep Marching concerts will take place at the DeWitt High School auditorium at 7 p.m. on Friday, January 17 and 3 p.m. on Saturday, January 18.
There will be a talk about the suffrage movement 45 minutes before the Saturday matinee.
