Cellist Seth Parker Woods first presented an early version of his semi-autobiographical program “Difficult Grace” in February 2020, just prior to the collective isolation of Covid shutdowns. Despite the restricted movement that ensued in the early pandemic, he continued to zero in on his inspiration for the work: movement, and more specifically the relocation of thousands of Black people from the American South to major cities and northern states.
The Great Migration, as it’s known, spanned the decades from 1910 into the 1970s. As the mass movement grew, evolved and expanded, it came to include Woods’ own grandmother.
“It’s a part of my history,” he said.
The matriarch of his family, Woods's grandmother had moved to Houston from a “small, tiny, rural southern Texas town called Weimar, which is one of the first German settlements in Texas.” Discussing the move with her, Woods was touched by the accounts of her hardship. (She died in 2020.)
Working through his feelings about her journey, he turned naturally to his cello, he said. In a way, “Difficult Grace” is his homage to what his grandmother endured.
Now a multimedia, genre-crossing program to be presented in its premiere at the 92nd Street Y tonight, "Difficult Grace" surrounds Woods’s solo cello with film, spoken word and dance. Functioning as narrator, guide and movement artist, Woods is the de facto leader of a performance that includes music composed “for and with” him by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Fredrick Gifford, Ted Hearne, Devonté Hynes (a.k.a Blood Orange), Nathalie Joachim and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. The “music vernacular,” as Woods put it, is “rooted in kind of Black folk music in America, as well as lots of jazz inflections.”
Seth Parker Woods is framed by colorful art in a previous version of "Difficult Grace" in Toronto.
As for the vast collaborative network involved in the presentation, that’s not unfamiliar territory: Woods explains that a large part of his career has been built by working with other people. That spirit, he added, is what “makes this show so special.” Among his current collaborators is dancer and choreographer Roderick George, who appears alongside Woods in “Difficult Grace.”
Woods compared his quasi-autobiographical work to the “The Migration Series” of artist Jacob Lawrence, a 60-panel collection of works from the 1940s that likewise draws upon The Great Migration. Though the events of that time period were tumultuous, as Woods put it, Lawrence nonetheless “finds a way to paint them with such vivid coloring.”
Similarly, Woods says that “Difficult Grace” layers the “celebrations and the people around” his grandmother in what he hopes is an equally vibrant way. The reflective program invites the audience to look at a past that informs “where we are now… even if the journeys are hard in some way.”
Further inspirations add further layers of nuance. “How do we celebrate ourselves?” Woods wondered aloud, citing Zora Neale Hurston’s celebration of Black culture and of “unabashed adornment.”
It’s a question he's grappled with personally as it relates to aging and identity. Beyond reflecting on migration and movement, he explains, “Difficult Grace” looks at what it means to get older, examining “stories that [the body] holds and it needs to tell.” Juxtaposing imagery and sensations of an aging body with themes of migration and movement produces an idea of newness: a “new world, a new life, a new journey.”
Tacking larger themes through music isn't isolated to just this one project; alongside more conventional classical-music programming, Woods’ 2022-23 season features surprises like “Iced Bodies,” which he'll perform on January 28, 2023, in Minneapolis as part of the Great Northern Festival. For that event, Woods will play an “an obsidian ice cello,” a move that he says strips the instrument of “its geographical or direct historical placement in time.”
Like “Difficult Grace,” the program marries the cello with other media. The instrument is “able to move through so many different worlds rather seamlessly," Woods said. “It’s an edifice that I play and break down.”
“Iced Bodies,” created in collaboration with composer Spencer Topol, was heavily influenced by artist Jim McWilliams’s 1972 work “Ice Music for London,” in which cellist Charlotte Moorman “played a cello-shaped ice sculpture with a plexiglass bow” for multiple hours” – in the nude.
Returning to themes of physical endurance and movement, Woods reflected that “the body [is] one of the first – if not our first – way of expressing ourselves, beyond our voices being our first instrument.”
That expression, at the center of “Difficult Grace,” also represents Woods’s journey regarding identity.
“‘Difficult Grace’ challenges a lot of things,” Woods said, explaining that it freed him from “some things [he} was scared of in the past, that were either linked to identity or to where I am as an artist or where I could go as an artist” – beyond what he called his strict classical upbringing. True to its notions of migration and exploration, Woods said the program has freed him to “explore multiple mediums.”
Whether the tears and triumphs of his grandmother’s geographical journey or Woods’s own personal journey with aging and evolving, the program “forces you to really think," he said. "It forces you to smile. It forces you to celebrate — but be reflective.”
Seth Parker Woods presents "Difficult Grace" at the 92nd Street Y, and livestreamed online, on Saturday, Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m.; 92ny.org
