CMS drama as performance art

I walked up to the Levine Museum of the New South Wednesday night for a forum on changing demographics and public schools, and found myself at one of the most unusual education events I've encountered.

The organizers from UNC Charlotte decided to forgo a traditional panel discussion in favor of performance art. School-related headlines spanning decades flashed on a screen, while performers read excerpts from court rulings, newspaper articles and personal essays. Civil rights lawyer James Ferguson, one of the readers, interspersed the prose with a cappella verses of Jacob's Ladder, with lyrics such as "Tell me, do you love all children? Leaders of our youth."

And so, 48 hours after covering an NAACP meeting with a crowd fired up to fight school closings in 2011, I watched a headline that was obviously decades old flash on screen: "Negro Groups Complain About School Closings."

Katie McCormick with the UNCC library said she'd started planning this session about a year ago, before the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board launched the student-assignment review that has people up in arms over proposed closings. "It turns out that this topic was more timely than we imagined," she said.

The historians were quick to incorporate breaking news. It was surreal to hear the final few minutes of the performance, where Ferguson and another reader turned quotes and snippets from articles I wrote last week into a sort of point-counterpoint poetry.

The discussion that followed wasn't exactly the bullet-point, solution-finding exercise that you see at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools forums. A mom about to send her child to kindergarten mused about feeling overwhelmed. A more experienced CMS parent commiserated: "It's always been overwhelming to get your kids in CMS."

Older speakers talked about living through desegregation. A Mallard Creek High School student gave his take on resegregation. Northerners and Southerners traded barbs over who was responsible for racial separation.

There was a strong sense of repeating history. A teacher at University Park Elementary, an arts magnet that's slated for closing next year, said it feels like we're going in circles, but as an artist she prefers to think of spirals.

"We can spiral upward," she said, "or we can spiral down."