Review: North Star, a Frederick Douglass Dance Party

There isn’t an intuitive connection between Ireland and the American struggle against slavery, but director Kwame Daniels would like to remind us that the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass found refuge in Belfast shortly after the publication of his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Daniels’s theatrical concert North Star, now making its North American premiere at Irish Arts Center, is partially an account of Douglass’s flight to Ireland, traveling in the opposite direction of millions of immigrants to a city that was poor and unsightly, but which had categorically rejected the slave trade.

This isn’t a garden variety history drama. Daniels was inspired by anti-migrant protests in Belfast, but more importantly the counterprotests that took place after, reasserting the city’s historical role as a refuge. The audience remains standing for the full 70 minutes, giving us a visceral sense of what it is to be free but unmoored, as the band (guitar, bass, keys, two percussionists, a string quartet, and a brass player) takes the stage.

Singer-songwriter Winnie Ama enters from the house cranking an old-fashioned music box. Then a choir of seven enters singing, weaving through the crowd to join the band onstage, to perform “Sweet Canaan,” a goosebump-producing a cappella song of hope. We know we’re in for something special.

Daniels intersperses the musical numbers with quotations from Douglass spoken in a soothing Planetarium voiceover and set to James Cunningham’s projections, which feature historical photography and animations. Sometimes we hear spoken word poetry by Nandi Jola, who stands on a small circular platform in the back of the house. Ama and rapper OneDa occupy similar platforms on opposite sides of the house (Aimee Williamson’s lighting activates these smaller stages, gently refocusing our attention). Daniels deploys videos of Belfast students speaking about their city, but he has also invited to the stage three New York City students (Fatima PIllacela, Zasha Singh, and Jaleel) to read their original poetry about the meaning of home.

It’s a concert. It’s a poetry reading. It’s a Ken Burns documentary. These disparate parts shouldn’t work together, but remarkably they do to create a 21^st century spin on an old-fashioned happening. It’s one of the most unique and delightful shows currently playing off-Broadway.

Ama’s voice, a slight rasp dipped in honey, is the aural equivalent of a bear hug. “I’ve got daisies round my head,” she sings (and she does), “I’ve got green grass for my bed.” Her songs are undergirded by a steady groove.

Jola‘s words are crisp and striking in their historical perspective. In her “Ode to Anna,” about Douglass’s first wife Anna Murray, she lets linger this line, ostensibly addressed to his second, Helen Pitts: “So tell me, Helen, whose side history ever on?” It’s more for us than it is for her.

Meanwhile, OneDa marches out a steady beat under her unflappable flow, getting the whole audience bopping with her. “Shall I pack my bags and run away? Should I hedge my bets and stay?” It was a question Douglass considered through much of his early life, and it is one that billions will ask themselves today in the face of economic insecurity, political upheaval, and climate change.

Even with all the heavy sadness of a world that arguably has more people in bondage than ever there were in Douglass’s time, the overwhelming feeling of North Star is joy—from celebrating the life of a great man and reveling in the culture that Black Americans have created even in the direst circumstances, music, art, and words that have gone on to indelibly change the whole world. You see that joy on the big broad smile of the choir and in the bodies of audience members as they dance along, happy to be alive and free.