The Voyage of the Delfina
Medium: Multimedia performance/installation
Dimensions: Variable
Date: 2002 – 2006
Location:
• Atrium, Cosby Building, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA
• A six city, German tour with poet Opal Moore
Description: One hundred performers representing the approximate number of abducted Africans who
embarked on the Delfina from an unknown port or ports on the west coast of Africa in
1832 sat in an installation representing the skeletal structure of a slaver. Thirty-three
performers were dressed in white, representing the approximate one-third of the passengers
who may have died during that voyage. The remaining sixty-seven performers were
dressed in black. Television monitors strategically positioned around the ship played a
video loop of the Atlantic ocean from the shores of Goreé Island, a former slave port in
Senegal and Portobelo, Panama, a major port of disembarkation for captured Africans.
The performance began with Joseph Jennings playing a mournful tune on his
saxophone, accompanied by soprano Laura English-Robinson and the
performers chanting a traditional Senegalese song retelling the sacrifice at Ndeer.
As the music faded, poet Opal Moore read a poem from her Middle Passage
series followed by five performers that rose, one at a time, to call out a traditional
African name and the village of an abducted African. When five names were
called, the music began playing again followed by poetry and another set of
performers.
The performers who were dressed in white left the ship and laid on
their sides mimicking the waves made by the boat. Those dressed in black
returned to their seated position on the ship. The performance ended when all
of the names were called, the poems read and the musicians completed playing.
At the request of the State Department in 2006 Opal Moore and I reconceived the
performance using the poems and images from the original work and presented
it in Hamburg, Kiel, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, Munich and Berlin, Germany