Porgy and Bess

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Performance art requires an audience as well as

an artist in order to accomplish its goal, and both

entities must participate in the experience. The

artist creates for the specific moment in which

the audience engages in the performance, while

the audience brings its collective values and

mores in evaluating the work. Although the art

may endure for ages, artists can only create their

works for the audience of the originating time.

DuBose Heyward wrote the novel

Porgy

for

a 1925 audience; Dorothy Heyward adapted the

novel into a play script and the Theatre Guild

produced the script for a 1927 audience; George

Gershwin composed

Porgy and Bess

for a 1935

audience. None of these artists envisioned a

2014 audience reading or viewing their art, and

they certainly could not have imagined the

eyes a 2014 audience would see through. To

appreciate

Porgy and Bess

one must see through

the eyes of the original artists and audiences,

and then we must expand the tapestry to include

ourselves as audience members with a totally

different vision.

The novel was written at the height of the

Harlem Renaissance, one of the most creative

and intellectual periods in African American

history. On the heels of World War I, the Harlem

Renaissance presented diverse pictures and ideas

of African Americans in the arts and literature

– African Americans who had long been the

object of ridicule, scorn, and misinterpretation.

With the advent of the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP) in 1909, the Association for the Study

of African American Life and History in 1915, the

National League on Urban Conditions Among

Negroes (National Urban League) in 1920, the

publication of

Crisis

Opportunity

and

Journal for

African American History

, and the widespread

circulation of African American newspapers,

new images emerged. African Americans took

pride in their past, even as the struggle for

equality became a battle cry in cities across

the country. Whites took in the new images

presented by writers such as Langston Hughes,

Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, James

Weldon Johnson, and scholars such as W. E. B.

Du Bois, Alaine Locke, and white socialite and

critic Carl Van Vechten. Interesting and fresh

works of art and literature were made available

to the public. It is in this atmosphere of “newness”

and unexplored images that Heyward found his

Charleston, South Carolina, characters‘ distinct

and unheard voices.

As a native of Charleston, Heyward had

a familiarity with the tenants of his fictional

Catfish Row (Cabbage Row) environment. The

residents were from the Gullah culture, a group

of African Americans who knew well the life of

slavery and Reconstruction, as they lived on the

various islands surrounding the mainland and

migrated to Charleston to find a “better” life.

Isolated on the islands, the Gullah – or Geechee,

as they were often called – long practiced

many of their West African customs, traditions,

PORGY AND BESS:

AN EVOLUTIONARY WORK

By Ethel Pitts Walker

Left to right, George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin.

DuBose and Dorothy Heyward