SPOKEN WORD AND MUSIC

Billie Holiday’s performances of “Strange Fruit” and Lugo’s ceramic portraits both function as acts of resistance.
Compare Holiday’s musical protest to Lugo’s visual protest.
How does each medium confront historical trauma?
Which is more effective, and for whom?

Just as Roberto Lugo layers visual patterns across porcelain surfaces, musicians like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and KRS-One layer musical and lyrical patterns across songs. Create either a musical create a spoken word piece whose structure mimics the patterns in:

• Billie Holiday’s phrasing and repeated motifs

• Nina Simone’s rhythmic intensity and harmonic tension

• KRS-One’s internal rhyme structures, repetition, and call-and-response

• Kendrick Lamar’s rhythms

”Read the rhythm of one of Lugo’s pieces. Recognize how visual rhythm can also be read as musical rhythm with layering, harmony and percussive elements. Create your own rhythm.

Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and KRS-One all use call-and-response patterns rooted in Black musical and political traditions. Lugo uses call-and-response visually by placing contemporary icons in dialogue with historical porcelain traditions.

Create a musical or spoken-word dialogue between:

• a historical figure represented by Lugo (Billie Holiday, Rebecca Cole, Matthew Henson, etc.) and

• a contemporary voice (your own).

This can be:

• two voices live

• split-screen video

• alternating stanzas

• alternating musical motifs