MUSIC PROFESSOR and acclaimed jazz musician Darrell Grant’s first opera, “Sanctuaries,” combines elements of jazz, spoken word and theater to explore the effects of Portland’s gentrification and the experience of displaced residents of color in the historically black Albina district. It features a libretto by two-time National Poetry Slam Champion Anis Mojgani and is directed by Alexander Gedeon. We asked art professor Lisa Jarrett, who co-directs KSMoCA (King School Museum of Contemporary Art) at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, to sit down with Grant to talk about his experience conceiving of and composing “Sanctuaries.” This is an abridged version of their conversation. Watch the interview at pdx.edu/magazine.
Due to coronavirus measures, the opera’s premiere has been postponed until April 2021. See thirdangle.org/sanctuaries for dates and tickets.
Lisa Jarrett: You’ve been focused on working on a story about gentrification and the history of blackness in Portland. Can you tell us a little about “Sanctuaries”?
Darrell Grant: Almost three years ago, I was approached by Third Angle New Music about doing a collaboration. The subject of chamber opera came up and I was like, “Why would I even think about doing that?” But the more I turned it over in my mind, the more I thought well, why wouldn’t I do that? That became the more interesting question: What is it about that genre, or that word, or the image of that art form that made me feel like an outsider? I started to wonder, is there a way for me to bring who I am—a jazz musician, an improvising musician, African American, performer, composer—to that genre in a way that feels really authentic and meaningful? “Sanctuaries” became the outgrowth of that exploration.
Jarrett: There was a quote that came up from one of your collaborators, Alexander Gedeon, who said, “We’re unflinchingly calling it an opera. People will have to unpack their resistance to this.” What was it about the form of opera that made “Sanctuaries” manifest in that way?
Grant: The idea that opera is a medium for storytelling writ large. It’s these huge, human themes of tragedy and the essential mythos of humanity. Oftentimes, those stories are told in the operatic genre because it combines in real time drama, literature, music, stagecraft and art. It’s the medium that ties all these things together. What was daunting was that most of the time the stories that it’s applied to are based in Western European cultural history. More recently, contemporary opera has started to deal with stories that don’t come from that lens. This idea that opera is becoming a medium through which other cultures can tell their own authentic stories was really interesting to me.
Jarrett: What potential do you think “Sanctuaries” has to more deeply connect us as African Americans?
Grant: In looking at the impact of gentrification on the black community, what’s happening now when you go to Mississippi Avenue or Williams Avenue is just the tip of an iceberg of systemic discrimination and disinvestment that goes way, way, way down. You trace it back through the Emanuel Hospital expansion, the construction of I-5 and the Minnesota Freeway and the demolishing of the black community with that. Then you look to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and why we needed it, and you realize that African Americans could not get FHA loans, or VA loans. I have this opportunity here to tell this story. A quote that I’ve been circulating in my mind a lot is “Art does not change the world, but art is able to give people a perspective that allows them to change the world.” So, when I think about my art informing that new perspective, one of the ways I can do that is to try and teach members of the population who are in positions of power and privilege. But then the other possibility is not to do that with the art. And that’s where I feel like “Sanctuaries” has landed. How do I tell this story not as a teaching thing for white communities, but as an empowering narrative of resilience for the black community? I’m going to use the fact that I’m a classically trained musician, but what if I invest all that education and energy into musical themes that come from the black vernacular? What would it take for me to create a piece that the African American community—which inspired this piece, which it is about, which it’s for—feels such ownership of it that it’s like this is our opera. That’s as much of a challenge as writing the opera. In doing that and in seeing it witnessed—that’s liberating. The process of holding onto oppression, of keeping the privilege in place, it’s draining so much energy from everybody in the community. Even though it’s scary to let go of some of the privilege, the energy released from it, from not having to protect it, and in seeing others thrive, is a greater victory.
Jarrett: In the process of making the work, what kind of dialogues did you find yourself having with Portland?
Grant: Part of doing this in Portland is that it’s about the city and it’s for the city, so it gives us an opportunity to amplify con - versations that are already going on about how to make this city something different than it is becoming. If we don’t want gentrification, what are the alternatives? Transportation, housing, racial equity—how might we do things differently in order to come to something different than what is the inevitable result of this gentrification in every city in America? We’re devaluing cultures, displacing people, erasing communities. We have to be able to do something better than that.