Ashli St. Armant is the new artist-in-residence at the Chandler Center for the Arts. She’s an author, educator, playwright and vocalist.
She also created and composed "North: The Musical," which was about the underground railroad, and was performed at the Chandler Center for the Arts earlier this year.
St. Armant’s next project is called "Ordinary Folks," which aims to bring to life classic stories from African American folklore. She joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
ASHLI ST. ARMANT: Well, you know, sometimes these projects do take years and I've just finished a tour with "North: The Musical." My first musical, which did a national tour in 10 stops and I worked on that show for four years before it hit the stage. So planning in advance for the next project to take two to four years is pretty normal for me. I really love the process. I think I almost love the process more than I love actually staging it because I learned so much about the content that I'm studying. I'm definitely a history nerd. I love to dig and I love to learn about culture and history and incorporate those things into my work. And so that's the biggest part of of what I'm doing.
MARK BRODIE: Well, it sounds like that's a really big part of what this next project is going to be in terms of digging into history and personal stories.
ST. ARMANT: Yes. It's become a theme of my work. And the more I write and create, the more I learn about my own family history and ancestry and the places that I come from, the places that we come from in terms of like the Black community and what experiences we've had. And there's so, there's a breath of experiences that we really don't talk about and how all those experiences have influenced the way we made, we have made art over the years, over centuries, really.
BRODIE: So how do you envision your process then to gather these stories and do the historical research that you're going to need to do for "Ordinary Folks"?
ST. ARMANT: A lot of it is coming from books and recommendations from other people. Some of it is going into my own ancestral communities ... and learning from elders to hear stories and things like that. But a big part of this project is not only taking historical stories from my own culture, but talking to other people who come from different cultures than my own local communities like Chandler, Arizona, and finding out what stories exist here. And so part of what I'm doing here in my residency is talking to local artists and local community members who don't necessarily consider themselves artists. But I personally believe that we are all artists but, and we all come from a culture that's rich with storytelling. And so I'm really interested in taking these stories and bringing them to life, giving them new life and helping other people do the same, and using that as a catalyst for understanding one another and change.
BRODIE: Am I right that you're also looking to take older stories and sort of give them new life, maybe put them into more of a modern context.
ST. ARMANT: Yes. So my idea, fingers crossed, is to find 10 to 12 stories from the Black American folk canon and turn them into songs and find a common theme between them and thread them together and turn that into a musical.
BRODIE: So how do you try to weave together stories in one cohesive show? The stories themselves can be very different. And as you pointed out, the people telling them can be very different and with different backgrounds. Like I would imagine it'd be very easy to have a show kind of be scattershot all over the place given that kind of material coming in.
ST. ARMANT: Yeah, I really think about that very carefully. You know, when we think about music for example, there's a genre of music like jazz, let's say, but that includes so many different kinds of representations. And so I think about it like that when I'm looking for stories, I am also looking for common themes alongside richness. And so those themes don't necessarily have to be like they're all stories about animals, but maybe they're all stories about courage, they're all stories about perseverance, things like that. And how we as modern day Americans can represent these classic traditional stories on stage, because really people who lived many years ago, decades, centuries ago, were multifaceted human beings as well. And so I try to find the nuggets that show that they were just like us.
BRODIE: Do you find that in some ways maybe the stories are a little more meaningful or powerful even if they come from people who come from different backgrounds, but still share some of those common themes and common identities?
ST. ARMANT: Yeah. I mean, even within the Black community, we've had so many different kinds of experiences even in the 17th and 18th century. It's not true that everyone was enslaved. It's not true that everyone who was enslaved had the same experience. And so thinking about the breath of culture with in the Black community in America over centuries is one thing. And then thinking about cultures across the community of Chandler is another way to think about it. And I'm really excited to see what common threads we find when we start digging.
BRODIE: So how do you go about trying to do that? How do you try to go about trying to find people who have these kinds of stories and are willing to share them?
ST. ARMANT: Well, first of all, there are incredible folk artists and folk performers here in Chandler, I've met some of them and they're incredible. So I'm really interested in learning how they present and gather stories and how they tell them and how they tell them in a way that invites audiences in to tell their own stories. For myself, when I, for example, I'm really obsessed with playground songs, especially from like America's Black playgrounds from the last 100 years. But really, these are hand-clapping songs that we all know, like "Miss Mary Mac," for example. And when I perform them, first of all, I love the intergenerational response where a grandma's like, oh, I know that song, I haven't sung that in 50 years. And then her grandchild who's like 10 is like, oh, you know that song, too?
But often times after the shows, people will come up to me and say, oh, let me teach you this new one that I know. And so it sort of inspires people to share this tradition of folk music. This was the reason why I called the show "Ordinary Folks" It spurs on this natural, word of mouth sharing. And so in the way that I will share from the audience, the audience will share back with me both in the show and after, which is really exciting.
BRODIE: Is there something special do you think about specifically folk tales, folk songs like that, that can help maybe bring people together or help people understand who they are and where they came from?
ST. ARMANT: 100%. That's been super true for me. I didn't realize how connected I could feel to my ancestors, people who I never met, because through their tales and this preservation of culture, I've learned that we had way more in common than I imagined. They also just became more real to me, like real people because they talk about relationships and being angry at your child and you know, things like that. And I thought I never thought about, I never thought about my ancestors in that way. Me personally, having an experience of being a person whose ancestors were enslaved, I felt a lot of shame, a lot of sadness around thinking about their lives.
And now I have a new perspective that I can say, yes, there were some very traumatic things that have happened to them, but they also experienced joy and the complication of best friends and like all these sorts of things that we experience now. And I, yes, definitely think that once we start talking, talking about that more often, and we look to these very honest preservations of culture, more honest than history books. We come to find that we are more alike our ancestors than we realize and our cultures are more alike than we realize. And I think that's a really great opportunity for us to get to know each other and to be more respectful of each other as a community.
BRODIE: I would think those connections would be super important.
ST. ARMANT: Yeah, it's been really, I feel more grounded now, especially because, because, you know, again, as a Black person in America, our last names and our culture and our, you know, music and all these sorts of things were tried to be stripped away from us, but these are the parts that we know survived. And so I feel more grounded and connected to my roots and that helps me feel like I'm stronger human being.
KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.
