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All Of It with Alison Stewart
'Toshi Reagon: The Parable Path' at The Greene Space
00:17:22
A new musical performance from the Greene Space artist-in-residence, singer-songwriter Toshi Reagon adapts Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, titled Parable of the Sower.
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Kusha Navadar
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Radio Announcer
I'mma put you on nephew.
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Toshi Regan
All right unc. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order miss?
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Radio Announcer
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
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Radio Announcer
Listener support at WNYC Studios.
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Kusha Navadar
Welcome back to all of it. I'm Kusha Navadar in for Alison Stewart. And now we're going to preview tomorrow evening's event at the Green Space. It's called the Parable Path. Walking in the footsteps of Octavia E. Butler. Considered the grand dame of science fiction, Octavia Butler published Parable of the Sower in 1993. Though the book takes place place in the year 2024, so it's quite poignant. In it, she meditated on the idea of surviving societal collapse, environmental catastrophe, and a cruel and negligent politics that have left Americans to fend for themselves. And at the Green Space tomorrow, they'll be presenting a musical adaptation of that Afrofuturist story of Survival. Written by singer songwriter Toshi Regan along with her mother, Bernice Johnson Regan the the production tells Butler's Afrofut story over the course of 30 original songs inspired by the over 200 year history of black music in this country. Let's hear a little bit.
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Toshi Regan
There's a new world coming. Everything going be turning over. Where you going be?
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Kusha Navadar
And joining me now, please welcome Toshi Regan to talk about her operatic adaptation of Parable of the Sower, which is showing tomorrow night at the Green Space. Tickets are still available. You can get them@the greenspace.org Toshi, welcome to all of it.
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Toshi Regan
Thank you so much. And I gotta correct you and the people, we are not doing that opera at the Green Space. It would be impossible. It's really huge, has, I don't know, 22 people in it and a full band. And we did it in New York last year at Lincoln center with over 2,400 people in the audience. And what we're doing tomorrow is we are really exploring the themes that came through with the opera and with the book that Octavia wrote for us. The two books really. Octavia Parable of the the Sower Parable of the Talents. And we have some really cool guests and we, I will be singing and I'll sing some songs from the opera, but we wouldn't fit into the Green space, as much as I love the green space.
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Kusha Navadar
So a little bit of conversation there and we're going to get maybe a little bit of performance from you. Toshi, get a little appetizer with what the full thing was that was at the Lincoln Center. Thanks so much for going into that. And you know, you come with such a, a wonderful intersectionality of talents and career interests there. You know, singer, composer, musician, curator, producer. Part of your title also includes congregationalist, right? Can you tell us what a congregationalist is?
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Toshi Regan
Well, this actually, you know, I come from people who sing in congregation, especially on my mother's side and so from southwest Georgia. And so I grew up, you know, hearing people sing. Not a lot of people singing by themselves, just always in a group. Grew up with watching my mom's group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. And I did like my band. I like instruments. My mom's an acapella singer. But even with my band, there's like 20, 25 different people who cycle out of my band. And when we did the opera, people were trying to figure out, first they weren't even wanting to call it an opera, but then they tried to call it, it's a folk opera. It's a rock opera they were calling, giving all these names. And Alexis Pauline Gums, really great author who's about to release the Audre Lorde biography that we've been waiting for forever. She called it a congregational opera. And that really makes sense to the spirit of my work. My work is really about bringing people together, having collaborations with other artists, or I would literally, you know, collaborate with scientists. I collaborate with all kinds of people. So it's to bring all of the things that might seem like they don't belong together together, and then, you know, make a beautiful sound. So that's. That's pretty much what I do. And.
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Kusha Navadar
And tell us a little bit about how you first experienced Octavia Butler's Earthseed Stories. What was about it that that clicked for you initially?
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Toshi Regan
I mean, I ran away from it. I was reading Octavia already, and my mother and I bought each other this book, the new one, when it came out for Christmas, and I read, like, two pages, and I'm like, nope, I'm not doing this.
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Kusha Navadar
What was it about it that made you go, nope? Sorry?
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Toshi Regan
It just felt. She writes with aliens, all kinds of situations, and sometimes you feel like a tiny bit of distance from the story. You're like, that happened over there. That happened in another time. But with that one, I just was like, this is about us right now. I could feel it. It was very scary. And then we did a semester for Toni Morrison at Princeton and doing singing, a cappella singing. And I was helping my mom, and you have to have a book. And my mother picked Parable of the Sower. And that's when I was like, I had to read it, and I had to get into the gift of that book. And then I had to, you know, watch as we did almost everything we should have done in order for those circumstances not to happen. So. Which is a pretty incredible experience if you've been reading it for. Since it came out.
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Kusha Navadar
Yeah. You know, listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Toshi Regan, who will be at the Green Space tomorrow for the Parable Path. Walking in the footsteps of Octavia E. Butler. You had mentioned that collabs were a really important part of all of your work. And here now we're hearing for this, a collaborator was your mom to actually get this opera going. What was that like, working with your mom in that way?
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Toshi Regan
I was great. I mean, we worked together since I was born, so it was just the same seamless journey that we always take together. And then she retired. She retired in 2014. And she said, I'm good, I'm done. And I was like, what about the opera? She's like, well, you know, call me if you need some help. But she basically was like, I'm finished. So we, with a beautiful team of people, I got it off its feet, you know, in workshops around 2015 with Shanta Thake and Mayan Wang and lots of, lots of real energy from different organizations and different arts organizations. It really is a congregational effort. Like everybody has their hands in this opera, like Camilla Ford's from the Apollo. It's something like everybody put their hands in it. We didn't have a producer and so I made a company so it could get produced. And it's shocking now because Octavia's now a TV show and I think there's a parable movie coming out. And I hope more of her work, people get to explore more of her work through different mediums. But it was an uphill journey, but a well worthy one.
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Kusha Navadar
Well, let's dive into Parable of the Sower a little bit. It was first published in 1993. The 30 plus years since then. Are there lessons that ring the most true to you or what do you feel like are the most important lessons to learn from that story for today?
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Toshi Regan
If you look at Parable the so and Parable the talents, one of the most important lessons that I learned is you are supposed to do that thing you think you're supposed to do to help the world in your lifetime. Like, do it now. Like, don't be like, oh, maybe later something will change. It's not, it's changing already. Everything is changing all the time. This is her thing. All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. And so if you are not instigating some kind of change in your life, and especially when you see things happening in a bad way with big institutions or government or anything that could be catastrophic to the planet, you are supposed to intervene. There is, it's you. It's not somebody else, it's you and it's your you from wherever you are. So her book is like a 15 year old girl inside of a walled community that's you. Like whatever place you are in, whatever capacity you have, you don't have to raise $10 million. You don't have to be the most famous person. You do something with what you have to instigate the change in the direction that we need away from catastrophic events. And she lets us know that governments will not usually do this, that the center of government's purpose is skewed away from protecting the earth or protecting the people or doing collaborative things, and more towards business and greed and the efficiency of whatever it is that they think they should do. Yeah.
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Kusha Navadar
What's interesting about that for me is that fans of Octavia Butler's work often allude to her foresight, talking about environmental collapse, societal neglect, the politician angle there, you know, an authoritarian politician whose slogan is literally make America great again. So, Toshi, when people say, you know, quote, octavia Butler knew. Where do you think she synthesized that. That foresight from? How did she know?
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Toshi Regan
I mean, she would say, you could do it. You know, she thinks she's. She has a line in the play. You know, once you let go of your fear, you can say, what's going to happen next? You can ask yourself these simple questions, like, you know, you can look at. Look at the ocean and the plastic that we put into the ocean. So I can say with all confidence that if we don't stop using plastic and dumping it into the water, that we're going to lose the ocean and we're going to use the life and lose the life in the ocean, and we're going to lose ourselves. You know, you can take these simple steps. You don't have to be like a scientist, but she is a great researcher. And I went and looked at her papers, and she researched everything. Everything that she's the book of fiction, but it's all true. So she really is kind of putting in each person's hands the capacity to kind of be in charge of a destiny, of moving forward. And she's asking you to, like, not take the things that are being given. Don't make an American refugee crisis. Like, that's ridiculous. Don't do it. Like, don't do it. We have the money to house everybody. We have the money to feed everybody. We are great and cool, wonderful people. Do not let your government put you out on the street.
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Kusha Navadar
When you're saying this, it also comes back to one of the big themes that she talks about in Parable of the Sower, which is that the idea of survival, I guess I would say, takes community, and that being adapted, adaptable, and fluid is more important than bunkering down and isolating. And that's kind of where hope comes from. And to that point, I want to play another clip. It's of you and your acoustic guitar. You're playing a song called Looked in the Mirror that I think speaks to some of these themes of hope. Let's listen to it.
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Toshi Regan
Well, I Fell on the darker But I was out of touch Tried to look towards the heaven but it was a bit too much can't see up above But I still know my name yeah can't see up above me But I still know my name in the.
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Kusha Navadar
Book, the main character, Olamina, suffers from a medical condition that's basically extreme empathy. She can't hurt people, even in self defense, without taking on that hurt herself. What's important about the way the story reconsiders the intersection of empathy and survival.
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Toshi Regan
Yeah, she has what's called hyper empathy. And she gets it from her mother, who she doesn't know because her mother took a drug in college. That makes you think more like makes expands your possibilities of learning. I was like, it's like the modern day speed or something that people want to do. And I think this is a very important thing that Octavia, that's a big gift. If you can feel what other people feel every time you're going around in danger. So she can feel like violence and it feels like it's happening to her. How do you also lead a revolution? It would seem like you would be the most vulnerable person, but what Octavia is saying, you can like learn and teach yourself how to feel all those things and move forward and be really capable. And maybe it even is helping your, your sight or your vision or your spirit even more. I think she's really asking us to find our courage and to know that we will feel pain and we will feel hurt and that we won't be in charge of everything, but that our forward movement is really the gift that we have. Our practice, our learning how to. The other thing I really like about this book is that they have some real good practices. They're on the road, they're vulnerable, but they always figure out where to sleep. And then when they figure out where to sleep, they always have a watch. Then it doesn't matter what happens during the day. They go through the same practice over and over again. That gets them forward. It's real old school practice of care and consideration. And so I think that some of those things, Octavia wants us to understand that we are experiencing our own versions of it now.
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Kusha Navadar
And how did all of that play into how you wanted to adapt it in terms of the sound? Like in the context of the show, what did you want the brand of Afrofuturism to sound like? Musically?
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Toshi Regan
I really used my own family. You know, the music my mom sings comes out of the 19th and probably the 18th century from our ancestors who were captured and Enslaved and the technology of song and a vibration that they pulled together to survive these horrific, horrific conditions. So we start off at the beginning of the story with, like, kind of some spirituals, like that one called what you gonna do when the world's on fire. Like, they're not all like, hey, this is gonna be great. That's one of the first things we sing, is what you all do in the world's on Fire. Like, you know, it's happening. What you gonna do? So, and then in the story, as Lauren's voice starts to become the dominant voice, I move the sound of the music more and more modern across time. So you start to get music that comes. It's more electric, more, you know, relevant to the 21st century. But we wanted to root it in this old music that my ancestors created for. For us because we wanted the audience to be held while hearing a very difficult story, and we also wanted them to sing with us at certain points. It all came together. Yeah.
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Kusha Navadar
Will people tomorrow night have the chance to sing with you?
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Toshi Regan
Yes. Tomorrow night I'm going to have some friends. I'm going to have Jong Won Kim, who is a great writer, a great educator on climate, and then I'm going to have a poet, Najee Omar, who I worked with a couple of years ago, and I'm going to have the great singer Alsada, who will be doing a song, and I will be singing. I will for sure have the audience singing. We sang a lot the first show of the residency, and so we gonna sing every time y' all come through.
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Kusha Navadar
That's great, Nadia. Go ahead, finish your thought.
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Toshi Regan
I just wanted to give a shout out too, because we will be in green space on May 22, the next night, and we'll be with J. Bob Alota from Mozilla foundation, and she is leading a discussion called 1, 2, 3, 4, do you know who you're voting for? And that's to kind of connect with Octavia, opening the story about around the elections of 2024, which is our time, so it'll be really fun to talk about that. She's also looking at the, you know, agency and autonomy and the age of disinformation, because they do a lot of tech stuff over there. So we will talk about those things as well.
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Kusha Navadar
Well, if you want to check it out, it'll be at the Green Space. We've been talking to Toshi Regan, singer, composer, musician, curator, congregationalist. The event's at the Green Space tomorrow. It's the parable path, walking in the footsteps of Octavia E. Butler. Toshi, thank you so much, and good luck.
- [19:13]
Toshi Regan
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yo.
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Radio Announcer
I'm gonna put you on, nephew.
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Toshi Regan
All right, unc. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?
- [19:21]
Radio Announcer
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
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Ira Flato
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.