"The Devil's Music": joy, love, anger, hurt and lust. Not bad for a night out!

My wife, Cherie, and I had a wonderful theater experience, recently. So wonderful that it prompts me to break all of the self-imposed rules for these posts. 

We spent two hours watching Miche Braden interpret Bessie Smith, one of the pioneers of the blues as a popular art form. Braden portrayed a woman 20 years her junior for the Mosaic Theatre Company in Washington, DC (https://www.mosaictheater.org/the-devils-music).

The theater wasn’t full, until Braden sang. Then there was scarcely room for another molecule! 

The set didn’t suggest the possibility of dance, until she danced. Then the theatre vibrated with terpsichorean zeal! 

The star, being decades beyond puberty, didn’t immediately convey libidinal energy. Then she turned a switch and everyone within a city mile turned on!

Braden said of Smith, to the Washington Post: 

"She was a belter, and she sang from her toenails. Most vocalists that I like sing that way. I like that fullness in my music — when someone’s singing with her whole body.”

The Post also quoted:  

“Bessie was like Billie (Holliday); she lived her songs,” Braden says. “Whatever situation she went through in her life came out in her songs. Bessie taught me to live through your music, and let your music live through you. If you’re trying to sound pretty or hip, it’s just fluff. I prefer to listen to someone who’s putting their life into their songs more than just a pretty voice. Oh, yes, I too have lived through some stuff that would kill a normal person.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/theater-dance/a-bessie-smith-dream-project-makes-its-dc-debut/2017/08/23/34df4a44-72e3-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html)

Turns out Braden helped create the piece. It finishes its run in DC this Sunday (10/1). However, Braden has performed it in other cities and presumably will in others still. Get there! If you can’t, send someone you love and urge her to film it on her iPhone--well worth a brief stay in prison! If you can’t get tickets, fly over in a helicopter with a directional mic. This is a treat!!!

If this post is about leadership across sectors (and I’m well aware that’s a stretch!) it’s about recognizing that we all bring much more than our bodies and our intellects to a job. We are all vulnerable and strong. Our personal anger and hurt & fear and pain mix with our special joy and love & passion and lust. We all mix them differently; so, are motivated differently. We also truncate them differently, bringing our own self-protections and cautions. In the end, though, we live and work for much more than money and career advancement. We live, perhaps, to figure out how to live!

Bessie Smith lived big! Miche Braden plays her every bit as big!