INTERVIEW WITH MENDI AND KEITH OBADIKE

Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature.  On May 14th at Roulette’s MIXOLOGY FESTVIAL, Mendi + Keith Obadike present – Taronda Who Wore White Gloves (radio beta). This musical narrative is the latest in Mendi + Keith’s series of “opera-masquerades.” Through pop songs and soundscapes this in-progress work tells the story of a reluctant debutante and her peculiar journey through an old rite of passage.

ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
Mendi & Keith Obadike: We are presenting songs and a story from our next project in development: Agunwayi, Or TaRonda, Who Wore White Gloves. This is a radio version for two voices (broadcast by Free 103 point 9 Transmission Arts) of a project that will later involve a full stage production. We are telling the story of an unwilling debutante, her family’s chemical lab, and the unlikely events at her cotillion. Our story was inspired by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ children’s book The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves (1974) and singer and social activist E. Azalia Hackley’s etiquette book The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916). The project is one in a series of “opera-masquerades”. Each “o-m” has a set of companion modules or related artworks, which serve as documents of the project and highlight resonances from the central concepts. Each of the works has a recording module, a theater module, a book module and an installation module. We will be building the installation and book module for this project in the fall at Bucknell University.

R: How did you meet your collaborators? What’s your history with your collaborators?
M&K: We’ve been working together for about 14 years on many different kinds of projects. We started discussing making opera based in hip-hop in the early 90s and took an interesting route through sound art, new media and transmission arts projects. We worked with Shoko Nagai and Keith Witty on our last musical theater project — Four Electric Ghosts at the Kitchen this time last year. Though we had seen Shoko play many times and heard Keith Witty, we were introduced to them through Guillermo Brown, who also played with us on Four Electric Ghosts. This is our first time working with Qasim, whom we met through the sage Greg Tate/Burnt Sugar. We are thrilled to be working out these new ideas with them.

R: How long have you been working on the project? What are you exploring, either in terms of imagery behind the work or performance tools?
M&K: We had a story about a debutante named TaRonda many, many years ago, but this incarnation has changed the story so radically that we may as well say it is brand new. Working on a piece about a debutante has led us to studying and experimenting with waltzes. We’ve experimented combining waltzes with Nigerian highlife and using the form in an interactive installation. We will see what sticks as the work develops.

R: Are there working artists today with whose work you identify, or rather, who do you consider to be your peers?
M&K: While our practices are a bit different we regularly follow the work of the collaborators that we mentioned above as well as the work of Angela’s Pulse (Paloma McGregor and Patricia McGregor), Vijay Iyer, Leslie Hewitt, Karma Mayet Johnson, Rashida Bumbray, William Cordova, Somi, Melvin Gibbs, Gordon Voidwell, Latasha Diggs, John Jennings, Imani Uzuri, George Lewis, Iona Rozeal Brown, Anti-Pop Consortium, and Pyeng Threadgill.

R: What are some defining characteristics of the musical scene you would fit yourself into? What elements of your scene differentiate it from what has come before, or what is happening now?
M&K: We seem to work a bit across zones and scenes. We’ve be inspired by a range of pop and folk sounds as well as what is sometimes called new music. We work in media art and experimental musical narratives of all kinds and so we go to where that work can be done from clubs to galleries, museum, universities and theaters.

R: What was the last music you listened to?
M&K: Sonny Sharrock’s master work Ask the Ages and Robert Ashley’s Private Parts

R: Chocolate, Vanilla or Rocky Road?
M&K: Hazelnut

R: What is music?
M&K: Music is any sound event that we find sensual, engaging, or significant.

R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
M&K: Both

R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
M&K: It was probably the simple elegance of an early Public Enemy / James Brown loop or Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha.

R: Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
K: I would say more than anyone else, my mother, Joyce Townsend. She has always encouraged and fully supported my interest in the arts and my commitment to making my own path, which I now know is not something to take for granted. She is really incredible. She sat through many piano lessons, ethnomusicologist lectures, and rock tribute concerts because her kid thought he might want to do something like this.

M: I, too, would have to credit my parents (Ron and Shirley Lewis) with playing a vital role in my development as an artist. I remember it being very important to them to introduce me to different artists as a kid. Sometimes it was because they loved the work, sometimes it was because the work communicated something specific about our culture, and other times it was because an artist was taking up a question or approach that related to my concerns. I was introduced to Brook’s The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves through my parents as a child, and frequently call on my mother as an editor (as I did with this project). In addition to my parents, Cave Canem founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady have also been extremely influential.
R: What is interesting to you about your own work?
M&K: We love telling stories together. The process of finding the musical language to accompany our story worlds and the story elements to accompany the musical worlds is challenging and fun, and we always learn more about each other in the process.

R: Do you do other things aside from music?
M&K: We make images, books and live events that relate to the music.