A GOD·SIB’S TALE: A Folk Opera

In a soaring, hypnotic soundscape blending Western music’s classical style and a Black cultural jazz/blues/gospel tradition, and vivid story-telling, the resilience of the Black feminine spirit is on display throughout A GOD•SIB’S TALE–A Folk Opera. Scripted and scored for eight Black women, the story is told through the lens of a pre-Civil Rights Movement, racially tense, 1957 America. A baby boy born of a forbidden relationship, is the bombshell that sets a small town aflame, and is the catalyst that forces these missionary women, sheltering from impending danger in their church sanctuary, to examine the themes of race, hatred and forgiveness. But, even more poignantly, they are compelled to reveal their own personal stories…coming to terms with love (and its many variants), loss, hope, ambitions, loneliness, and old, yet still-smoldering trauma. The question of whether forgiveness is even possible lingers when the tale is told: will love ever be enough? Though set in a time gone by, relative to today, the work’s message is one of women, Black women, realizing the well-spring of power they possess when they embrace, accept and love, ‘self’.

Pamela Baskin-Watson has partnered with the incomparable Nedra Dixon to develop a new work entitled A GOD·SIBS TALE: A Folk Opera (Watson-book/music/lyrics, Dixon-book/additional lyrics). It was workshopped on Jan. 4th-7th, 2022, then presented in a staged reading on January 8th as part of the BLACK REPERTORY THEATRE of KANSAS CITY’s New Works Festival.