June bug Productions celebrates 40th anniversary
10th February 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In early 1964, the Black press caught word that something special, something revolutionary, was being birthed in Mississippi.
Reporters learned about the founding and first aspirational steps of the Free Southern Theater, an innovative, artistic repertory and production company based at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss.
With deep connections to both the quickly advancing Civil Rights Movement – including the surging, influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations – the Free Southern Theater set out on its mission of nurturing, producing, displaying, funding and championing Black artists from every medium.
The nascent project – which was buffeted by the involvement of significant individual Black artists like Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte – aimed to raise Black consciousness, education and expression, especially in the deep South, where the rigid, oppressive, and sometimes violent control of Jim Crow continued to govern society.
After that, the FST hoped to bring that message to the larger society as a whole by attracting and involving integrated audiences and performance companies, and traveling across the country to stage productions and offer exhibits for the masses.
With often debilitating challenges like managerial disagreement and lack of funding, the FST moved to New Orleans in 1965. The company immediately opened its doors to auditions by local actors and artists of all ethnicities for an acting apprenticeship, and other arts productions around the city, such as the Dillard University Players’ Guild rallied behind the FST with benefit productions to provide a much needed financial shot in the arm.
The FST soon performed its first effort as a New Orleans entity, putting on two, one-act plays by Edward Albee at the Dryades Street YMCA, itself a local landmark with rich history. The change of scenery proved vital to the repertory’s modest success, but several of the theater’s founders, including John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses, left the production company, which then gradually lost financial support and artistic passion, forcing the FST to close in 1980.
But the visionary, driven O’Neal took the seed that he helped plant with the FST’s creation and founded Junebug Productions in 1980 in New Orleans, thereby establishing the artistic and spiritual successor to the innovative Free Southern Theater.
“Junebug Productions emerged from the Free Southern Theater in 1980 with a mission to create and support artistic works that question and confront inequitable conditions that have historically impacted the African American community,” states Junebug Productions’ Web site in describing the theater’s mission.
Junebug didn’t just pick up the FST’s torch – it expanded, enriched and spread it across New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, the deep South, the country and even the world, bringing Black artistic vision and performance to new geographic, cultural and social reaches. Now, four decades after Junebug’s founding from the hands of O’Neal, the production company is celebrating its 40th anniversary in a big way.
On Jan. 29, Junebug leaders, supporters and patrons gathered at the Ashé Powerhouse Theater to launch the organization’s 40th anniversary celebration and discuss what the production currently has planned for its 2020 season.
In addition to its 40th anniversary productions, exhibits and initiatives, Junebug – which was named after folk character Junebug Jabbo Jones, who features in several of the company’s productions – announced the creation of the John O’Neal Cultural Arts Fellowship totaling $100,000. With the O’Neal funding, the production company awarded grants of $20,000 each to five New Orleans artists to support their artistic and creative projects for 2020; those artists are Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye, Shana Griffin, Kiyoko McCrae and Sunni Patterson.
O’Neal’s passing (nearly a year ago) and the burnishing of his legacy now imbue Junebug Productions with even more urgency, which is reflected in the advancement of the cultural arts fellowships in his name, said Stephanie McKee-Anderson, Junebug’s executive artistic director.
“He wrote about the values of our organization. He talked about things being a constant struggle,” McKee-Anderson said. “Every generation comes up with values that are similar, and they face new struggles.”
She added that, like O’Neal, the current leaders and members of Junebug Productions “support democratic rights for everybody, and we place that in a social context, in a legal context, in a cultural context.”
However, she added, Junebug – as well as John O’Neal’s work and legacy, and the overall Black arts movement spanning the past decades – also remains grounded in its roots as an African-American organization, one that represents and nurtures the successes and struggles of people of color.
“It’s African Americans who have been oppressed and exploited,” she said. “We are always aware of what we’re working toward.”
Still, she added, the group works for “anyone else who has been suppressed, not just on a local level, but on a national and global level. “Equality in art is inseparable from our quality of art,” she continued. “It’s about placing the journey over the arrival.”
The close connection between Junebug Productions – as well as the Free Southern Theater before it – and John O’Neal remains a key aspect of the production company’s identity and mission, a fact that was highlighted in the 2016 book, “Don’t Start Me to Talking: Plays of Struggle and Liberation,” a compilation of O’Neal’s most cherished and influential works.
The volume includes a list of the book’s contributors, including, collectively Junebug Productions, the embodiment of O’Neal’s lasting legacy. The book stresses the history of the tragedies and triumphs of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement as viewed through the lens of O’Neal’s mind and his plays.
“In the post-segregation era,” the book states, “Junebug Productions remains conscious of those bloody, difficult integration struggles that have now created a new set of equally challenging conditions.”
The book adds that the company also symbolizes the continuation of the communal, expansive collaboration of people from every stratus and facet of society that drove the Civil Rights Movement.
“A vital legacy of The Movement is the recognition that the greatest subsidies required for the development of culture usually come from the artists themselves,” it states. “Therefore, Junebug Productions has evolved a working style based on collaboration among creative artists, managers and community organizations who share a commitment to similar goals and a desire to maximize scarce resources.”
Junebug’s artistic and performance calendar will continue to reflect all types of art, from dancing to playwriting to oral traditions, and McKee-Anderson said the theater will utilize current technology to spread its work and legacy across every mass medium.
McKee-Anderson said the repertory’s flagship program will continue to be the Homecoming Project, in which Junebug Productions stays attuned to the artistic and generational trends in New Orleans and remains engaged with individual artists and organizations in order to fuse culture and ongoing, progressive change. The program encourages people within the local community to identify, strengthen and celebrate their unique New Orleans heritage, commonality and identity.
The result is a continuing series of works and presentations that use artistic expression as a means toward achieving progressive change.
Junebug’s other main effort will continue to be “Gomela,” the group’s own self-created, self-produced and grant-funded production that, for 2020, will feature “Movement of Our Mother Tongue.”
Other programs include the Story Circle, in which participants share ideas and goals as a group, and touring companies that will make stops in Brooklyn and Detroit, among other locales. Junebug will also continue to host touring productions from outside New Orleans.
A crucial goal running through these programs and the rest of Junebug’s efforts is the development of emerging, young leaders in the community, from both the artistic and sociopolitical perspective. “We want to turn around and try to create a core of leaders that can become a type of brain trust [of ideas],” McKee-Anderson said.
City Councilman Jay Banks, said that in the repertory’s 40th year, it’s still going strong, and that the city of New Orleans will continue to back the theater’s efforts.
“Stephanie McKee-Anderson says that arts are an integral part of thriving, healthy communities, and [the Council] can’t agree more with the artistic director of Junebug Productions,” Banks told The Louisiana Weekly in a statement. “District B was honored to take part in their 40th anniversary celebration, where they announced the $100,000 John O’Neal Arts Fellowship. Junebug’s advocacy work and influence on the arts are parts of their important mission. They strive to address a decades-long issue in the field of arts – the importance of direct support to individual artists that are hyper-local in its focus.”
Arts Council New Orleans Executive Director Alphonse Smith told The Louisiana Weekly that the Arts Council looks forward to continuing to join with Junebug Productions and other local arts organizations to preserve and promote Black arts in New Orleans.
“Junebug’s place in our local Civil Rights history, and its influence on the advancement of the Black Arts Movement in New Orleans cannot be overstated,” Smith said. “We celebrate Junebug’s 40-year commitment to supporting Black artists and the five recipients of the recently announced John O’Neal Cultural Arts fellowship.”
As O’Neal’s creation enters its fifth decade. McKee-Anderson echoed those sentiments, adding our nation and society continue to, at times, lurch forward in progress and stumble back toward regression, often falling victim to the political winds of the day and being tested by constant changes in social and political mood, direction and reality.
That is especially key now, when the country is in the grips of painful division and malevolence of intent and results.
“We’re in one of our healthiest spaces, with our purpose, our direction our mission,” McKee-Anderson said. “We’re set up to thrive in the future. We want to leave a legacy, no matter where the world will be.
“We need to be really clear what we do,” she added. “We’re about the art. The art comes first. Art is an integral part of a healthy, thriving community.”
This article originally published in the February 10, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
