Frances "Bitsie" Clark | Music | Arts & Culture | Theater | Visual Arts | COVID-19
Aaron Jafferis looked right into the camera. His hair was mussed beneath a baseball cap. His eyes locked with the viewer’s, connected through networks of screens and fiber optic cables. His proximity felt warm, intimate even. He rolled his shoulders and tilted his head just a little before launching into the introduction.
"I'm actually writing Smooth Criminal so I can sneak into other white peoples' heads while they're sleeping," he began, his voice steady. "And plant subliminal messages so they'll ask uncomfortable questions about race and money in their own lives, and workplaces, and families."
Jafferis is the latest recipient of The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists' annual award, a $5,000 grant that has gone to artists Barbara Harder, Harold Shapiro, and Adam Matlock since its launch in 2018. The grant, which will support work on his evolving show Smooth Criminal, was announced Friday night in a video message and party celebrating the fund. Longtime arts champion John Motley emceed the event, which also marked Clark’s 89th birthday.
"Thank you for all for coming to my birthday party," said Clark, who peppered her remarks with Cole Porter and a candle-topped birthday cake.
The fund is named after Frances “Bitsie" Clark, a longtime supporter of New Haven's arts scene and former director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Clark is tenacious: she has served as event planner, budget balancer, mission shaper, board member, unofficial historian, alder and taskmaster during her time in the city.
The fund is run by the "Bitsie Chicks," a Bitsie Clark fan group comprising Robin Golden, Maryann Ott, Mimsie Coleman, Betty Monz and Barbara Lamb. In three years, it has supported projects including long-exposure photography of instruments to an opera on the Tulsa massacre of 1921. Jafferis' work is the latest in that lineup.
Friday evening, both past and present recipients praised the fund, thanking both Clark and the Bitsie Chicks for their dedication to cultural projects around the city. Matlock, whose opera focuses on vigilante and state violence in Tulsa’s Black-owned business mecca of Greenwood, said that he has been thinking about the way history repeats itself.
Almost a century after white mobs burned down an economically self-sufficient Black neighborhood—a violence repeated by police, urban renewal, and the carceral state—he spent the summer working on the opera watching millions of people protest the state-sanctioned murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and dozens of others.
“There’s a certain way that living through history changes your perspective,” he said, speaking over the piano as he played. “You’re constantly rocking back on your heels due to the barrage of current events. And you’re not always left with time to process what it is you’re experiencing and connecting to.”
The pandemic has changed the nature of his work, he added. It has been bad for his attention span, and also given him unexpected time to think and work. Due to COVID-19, the opera will likely premiere with an online watch party. The work is a collaboration with the musician Brian Slattery, arts editor for the New Haven Independent and a fellow member of Dr. Caterwaul's Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps.
This year, six finalists included poet, playwright and reporter Allan Appel, filmmaker Stephen Dest, author Rebekah Fraser, artist Dana Elizabeth Fripp, musician and opera singer Dr. Tiffany Renee Jackson, and artist Martha Willette Lewis. In the prerecorded video announcement, different Bitsie Chicks gave a quick overview of their projects, from Appel's play on nineteenth-century engineer William Lanson to Jackson's musical production From The Hood To The Ivy League.
Jafferis' work, of which there was a workshop production at Collective Consciousness Theatre in 2016, addresses white privilege, economic injustice, the city’s nonprofit industrial complex, and creative appropriation through poetry, verse, and audience participation. The work is inspired by both his family’s history and his mother, who passed away shortly after Jafferis started writing Smooth Criminal. The funding will allow him to write a second act to the show.
Aaron Jafferis, with student Anton Kot at a rehearsal of The Word at Neighborhood Music School in January 2018. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
“It’s only recently that I’ve begun to realize that my mother is still living in me, even more than whiteness is,” he said. “And so I can continue having these conversations and these arguments with her, in my head, in my body, in this play. And so I’m excited to have this opportunity, thanks to Bitsie and the Bitsie Fund to continue this work.”
Friday, he guided viewers through a group meditation, joking that “I can’t see you, but God can, and she will know if you’re cheating.” He said that as of late, he has been thinking about new ways to shift power, including the act of restoring Indigenous land to its rightful owners instead of giving a land acknowledgement at the beginning of a performance or talk. He performed an excerpt from the show, giving viewers a glimpse of the work to come.
“A hundred years ago, one great-grandfather was dying in prison after trying to murder the foreman who denied him work, while the other was running the country’s largest banking empire,” he said of the show. “Their ghosts mud-wrestle in my body. Blood-writing this play: about them, my family, me. This play’s been writing me all my life.”
Find out more about the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists at its website.