Poet Sekou Sundiata brings his story about illness, recovery to stage

Poet and performance artist Sekou Sundiata has described his one-person performance, blessing the boats, as "a personal story about friendship and love. At its heart, it's a story of needing a kidney and how five of my friends volunteered to donate theirs."

The award-winning poet, who for five years battled life-threatening kidney failure and recovered through an organ transplant, will perform blessing the boats at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 5, in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Lively Arts is sponsoring the performance, which combines dramatic monologue, comedy, music and projected images. "There's a lot of humor in the piece," Sundiata said. "It's not a chronology; it's a reflection on a certain period of time in my life. It's a night of theater."

Raised in East Harlem in the 1950s, Sundiata has described himself as a ritual poet rooted in the black church, the black-arts movement and the black avant-garde.

A professor at the Eugene Lang College of the New School University in New York City, Sundiata currently is in residence on campus, teaching an undergraduate class titled Writing for Performance. The course is offered by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, which is sponsored by the Drama Department and the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford, with support from the Haas Center for Public Service.

The poet is at work on a new project. Its working title is The America Project. The piece was triggered by 9/11 and its aftermath, but grew out of "an adult lifetime thinking about and being engaged with issues of citizenship," he said.

A discussion with the poet will follow the Feb. 5 performance.

On Feb. 14, Sundiata will make a presentation designed for families at 6 p.m. at the Mountain View Community School of Music and Arts. The post-performance discussion and the Mountain View appearance are free and open to the public.

Tickets are still available for the Feb. 5 performance. For tickets and more information, contact the Ticket Office at Tresidder Memorial Union at 725-2787 or visit the web at http://livelyarts.stanford.edu.

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