Philip Mallory Jones

work-in-progress

Enter the immersive graphic novel, Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs, and step into the Chicago South Side during the period spanning the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the Chicago Renaissance, World War II and the post war decade. It is a tapestry, woven of the tales of a family and community surviving, and sometimes thriving, and personal discovery, spanning five generations, and ranging from a back alley on the South Side, to a sharecropper’s yard in Franklin County, Kentucky, to a dusty street in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Time and place can shift with the opening of a door, or the turn of a corner.

This is a work of imagined memory and expressive visualization, a collage in motion, a theater-of-the-surround. The stories are derived from the fiction, poetry and oral history recordings of Dorothy Mallory Jones, and other witness/participants in the times and places depicted.

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Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs is currently being developed as a web browser app, accessible via desk top and mobile devices.

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The setting is an impressionistic rendering of South Side Chicago, 1925-1955, and the neighborhood is populated by distinctive recurring characters, interactive objects and dramatic tableaux. The visitor enters a richly detailed immersive environment, dynamic with activity, and responsive to the visitor’s presence and interaction.

Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs is a collection of stories and scenes that intersect, through narrative paths and/or place and time. Through exploration and interaction, the visitor encounters characters and scenes, finds stories within stories, and follows paths, some of which are only discerned through choosing a particular point-of-view (first-person, over-the-shoulder, or autonomous camera). Some elements of the narratives may only be accessible through one of the p-o-v, but not others. How one looks determines what one sees.

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Read the draft Prologue

Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs is organized in episodes, accessible from the main interface screen. At the beginning of each episode, the visitor is at a particular location, in a particular season and year. One or more narrative sequences are encountered in each episode. Within an episode the visitor encounters multiple scenes, moments and characters that can be investigated, and woven into the story. As the visitor triggers narrative scenes, or interacts with certain objects, new scenes and paths become accessible. A door that was previously locked is now open. A main narrative scene can sometimes be an intersection between episodes, but may transpire differently depending on in which episode one encounters it. Whose story is foregrounded in the episode gives a scene a particular point-of-view. When one encounters a particular scene for a second (or more) time, it becomes a deja vue moment, a cross roads where new choices are possible and paths are opened.

mind maps

The mind maps are research, compilation and organizing tools for historical documentation, developing the narrative threads and episodes, and plotting the navigation paths.

Sample scene:

In front of the Park Manor Arms, afternoon, summer, 1935. Big Bill Broonzy plays fiddle on the front stoop. Neighbors and children casually gather.

Enter the front door of the Park Manor Arms. Read names on mailboxes, and find apartment number you seek. Go up stairs one flight and down the hall. Enter apartment – story sequence transpires.

Exit apartment with direction to visit Pearl’s Beauty Parlor, around the corner. In halls are partially open doors, snatches of conversations and other sounds to investigate, other characters to encounter.

Follow certain voices and sounds down creaky dark stairs to the basement. Big Bill Broonzy has raped a 13 year old girl. He flees for his life, just ahead of the enraged father with a pistol.

(You later hear that Big Bill hopped a freight train to Mound Bayou, MS. Twenty years later, Emmett Till is murdered in Mound Bayou, and his mutilated corpse displayed at his funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, Chicago.)

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Sample scene:

Franklin, KY 1927/1850’s

Tommie Lee, 7 yrs old, with her father and younger brother, visit the plantation on which that side of the family originated. The girl watches the motionless, expressionless light-skinned old woman who was over 100 years old, her great great grandmother, daughter of the plantation master and a black woman. The old woman sits for hours, staring across the yard and fields at scenes from other centuries.

Among the locations to be featured in Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs: South Side Community Art Center, Callie’s Kitchen, South Side Writers’ Project, George Cleveland Hall Branch Library, Parkway Community House, Horace Cayton’s apartment, Parkway Ballroom, Rhumboogie, Savoy Ballroom, Savoy Outdoor Boxing Arena, Regal Theater, South Center, Club Delisa, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, Johnson Publishing, Chicago Defender, Ada’s Chicken Shack and Madame Bertha Reader & Advisor. Also the neighborhood poolroom, juke joint, barbershop, beauty parlor, funeral parlor, storefront church, soda fountain, and shoe shine stand.

Characters in Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs interact with each other, performing elements of the scene, or background activity. Some characters are guides for the visitor, as well as actors in the drama. They interact with visitors, giving suggestions for following narrative paths.

Each distinctive character’s facial features, body and attire are unique and appropriate for the period and place. The characters have custom movements derived from original motion capture sequences and/or animations created in several 3D modeling and animation environments.

The visitor moves into and out of areas with particular compositions of voices, sound effects and ambience, with elements triggered by visitor movement, manipulation of objects, and interaction with characters. The soundscape is more than an analog of the visual, it is an expressive composition, weaving voices, environmental ambience, and the distinctive sounds of the time (radio, phonograph, film, tv).

The distinctive visual style of the environment is intended to evoke, at times, an experience of exploring a three-dimensional collage in motion, a glimpse through a mind’s eye, fracturing point-of-view, collapsing past-present-future.

This aspect of the production design concept begins with the complexity, coherence, and precision of Romare Bearden’s 2D collage works. Moving this to an immersive environment adds depth, duration, navigation and choice, interaction with the environment and characters, and multiple points-of-view. This is the temporal terrain of magical realism. This dimensional expansion of the visual also expands the possibilities and challenges of the narrative composition. How the story is told, and the meanings conveyed, are integral to the design of the environment.

Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs, is currently being developed for publication as a web browser app.

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The street scenes, building facades and interiors are richly detailed hybrid forms and surface textures derived from 3D sculpted objects, digital graphics and archival sources.

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The environment is richly embedded with media elements that are the social, cultural and political context in which the episodes unfold. Newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions, posters, and cinema clips are woven into the scenes, and are responsive to visitor manipulation. The embedded media might impart elements of the stories, or provide a bit of the social/political/cultural context of the time and place.

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Links to related resources can be found on the Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs companion web site.

Intergenerational Collaboration

The matrix of themes, narrative threads and characters in Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs is derived from the fiction, poetry and oral history recordings of Dorothy Mallory Jones. My artistic collaborative relationship with Dorothy Mallory Jones, poet, novelist, historian, and my mother, is a work-in-progress spanning over three decades. We have collaborated on several major projects including The Trouble I’ve Seen (1976), an impressionistic video/broadcast portrait of black life in rural Georgia; LISSEN HERE! (2005), a print portfolio of image/text compositions published in limited edition; and In The Sweet Bye & Bye: An Immersive Memoir (2007), transposing her text into the 3D immersive realm of Second Life.

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Our collaboration is intensely gratifying and stimulating for me. We have, in Teshome Gabriel’s phrase, “shared language and retained secrets”. Our individual works inhabit different worlds, yet our visions and understandings intersect and converge. When we collaborate, we approach the subject from distinct points-of-view of age/generation, gender and experience, yet know common ground. This is fundamental to my commitment to migrate and transpose the wisdom and insight of the elders into contemporary and future expressive realms.

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motion study 1: the neighborhood (04:30)

Motion Study 1 is documentation, and evocation. Using the machinima (inworld motion media) capabilities of Second Life, the camera eye explores the streets and interiors of the work-in-progress installation.

The Charles Mingus composition/performance, Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues, is the soundtrack for Motion Study 1. This piece, in its compositional structure, as well as evocative voice, is one of my principle guides in the development of Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs.

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motion study 2: Show Lounge interior (02:00)

Motion Study 2 is the preliminary concept visualization for one of the interior environments. The mannequins and camera movement gives impressions of the look and feel of the scene as it will be when fully realized and populated by avatars.

The soundtrack is an excerpt from Cleo’s Back, by Junior Walker and The All-Stars.

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motion study 3: apartment house (00:48)

Motion Study 3 is a glimpse of the development of the Park Manor Arms apartment building environment, and the characters that inhabit it.

The soundtrack is an excerpt from Myself When I Am Real, by Charles Mingus.

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