NYT Feature: A Musician Explores His Sometimes Painful, Often Joyous Family Lore
In a new multidisciplinary work, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler explores his family’s Gullah Geechee roots in South Carolina with a host of collaborators.
Excerpts from NYT feature by Anastasia Tsioulcas
It took Jeffrey Zeigler years to process a well of family stories that he had learned as a young adult. But when he did, it was transformative, both personally and artistically.
“All I knew about my father’s background was that he was born in South Carolina and raised in Philadelphia, and that was pretty much the beginning, middle and end of the story,” he said."
What Zeigler eventually learned came from an older relative, Burnice Perry, whom he met in 1992 when she was in the Bay Area for a bridge tournament. While Zeigler was an undergraduate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., he began visiting Perry at her home in Mount Vernon.
“She became the grandmother I never had,” said Zeigler, who learned that his great-great-grandfather, an enslaved man named George Washington Friday, was the son of an enslaved West African woman and a slave-owner father. That was just one piece of family lore — sometimes painful, often joyous — that Perry shared, along with the family’s Gullah Geechee heritage.
Zeigler invited a small constellation of collaborators to help with the project, including the composers Etienne Charles, Tamar-kali and Hannah Ishizaki; the choreographer and dancer Reggie Gray, also known as Regg Roc; the director Ras Dia; the clothing designer Fulani Hart; and the visual artist Sister Sylvester. The resulting work, “We Were Fridays,” is a stylized combination of dance, music, theater and visual projections, which premieres on Friday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. (It returns to Brooklyn on Oct. 17 at Weeksville Heritage Center, the site of one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America.)
Read full article in the New York Times here.
We Were Fridays out September 18th on all streaming platforms.
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