You can watch the full review and interview with Ebony Noelle Golden on YouTube. 

It is your black birthright to mark beginnings in white attire and with movement. Christenings, baptisms, revivals, cotillions + debutante balls, opening convocation at an HBCU, weddings, and now the 2024-2025 season of National Black Theatre (entitled Pilgrimage.) The opening piece of the season is Ebony Noelle Golden’s “The Divining: Ceremonies from in the name of the m/other tree” which fills the mouth and stirs the spirit. 

Ebony’s body of work takes hold of your hand and leads the way back to the land and the water. In our interview, I’d ask how she could seed those themes in a place of stacked concrete. She didn’t tell me, she took me. On the opening processional, we journeyed to gardens in the village (Harlem) and heard from those Ebony deems “cultural famers.” She didn’t tell me, she took me. In the Victoria Theater, there were crickets and night sounds and the smell of clay dirt. Life began in a garden.

Many things can be simultaneously true: it is not a play, not a show, not a musical, there are performers, there is music. Must it be defined? Distilled? I held my tongue in my grandmother’s kitchen. She had told me on another occasion to just listen. Watch and try to learn something. The Divining… presents itself as an elder. Showing you everything, telling you nothing, expecting (reasonably) for you to intuit the intended meaning. It’s only frustrating if you demand predictable structures, if you insist on checking off the story elements like a grade school reader. You are God, stop thinking.  

The next time you start to describe a performance as ‘immersive,’ resist. Give this word a rest; it is overworked. Did the show begin with a swish of live branches in the atrium? I doubt it. This one did. Reconsider also: spiritual. If you possess a spirit, every moment of our lives is a spiritual experience. The Divining… calls us to remember. Y’all eat and do not pray. Y’all breathe and do not believe. They only believe what they see. 

Altars can be erected in any corner with whatever holds value for you, the supplicant, though they may not be as beautiful as the ones crafted for the show by Victor Lee Givens. An idea for my altar? Pits from all of the peaches I’ve eaten this summer, washed and dried. After years of flaky crusted cobbler offered free-of-charge, I planted an adolescent peach tree in the front yard on Mothers Day. I never ate the fruit it bore; we moved the next summer. In my recurring dreams I return – juices run down my chin – and the fantasy is enough. Home and church and family and salvation is where you are. There is nothing here that is not still God.