The Langston Hughes Project

Performing at South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center (Feb 23 - Feb 23)

Synopsis

The Langston Hughes Project - Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, a masterwork written in twelve-parts by Hughes in the early 1960s. This production is brought to life in a multimedia production is Langston Hughes at his best: insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful. On stage the audience experiences the mood of the Harlem Renaissance in this 800-line suite of poems illustrated by the spoken word, accompanied the Ron McCurdy Quartet and the large as life visual illustrations on screen of Hughes' world through his collaborators and contemporaries.

The work is described as a multimedia performance involving spoken word artist, jazz quartet and a slide presentation of images from the Harlem Renaissance. All of these components occur simultaneously. This multimedia presentation recreates Hughes's vision of the global struggle for freedom in the early 1960's. African American artists and photographers including Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, and Romare Bearden link words and music to a kaleidoscopic collection of images. Music director and composer Ron McCurdy orchestrates the original musical based on the music cues suggested by Langston Hughes.