'Folk opera' in Beacon examines early conflict

A taut thread connects Jean-Marc Superville Sovak's prolific artistic output and prodigious advocacy work: exposing hidden histories.

"I closely identify with past events that are erased or suppressed," he says. "And it's no coincidence that is often the case with people of African descent."

A sculptor, visual artist and activist, Superville Sovak is bringing There Are NO Black Shakers: A Contemporary Folk Opera to The Yard in Beacon on Thursday (July 24) for the work's second staging following its premiere in September at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany.

After writing the libretto, he took hymns from the radical religious commune to Beacon violinist Gwen Laster, asking if it would be possible to "bluesify them," he says. "She said, 'Anything can be bluesified.'"

Other Beacon residents performing the work, which is punctuated with spoken-word interludes, include Damon Banks on bass, vocalist Melvin Tunstall III and Patrick Jones on banjo and guitar. Superville Sovak lived in the city for 11 years before moving to Plattekill in 2020.

The story centers on a strange and obscure legal case from 1810 that he discovered while visiting a friend's art exhibit at the Shaker Heritage Society. When he asked director Johanna Batman if the group ever had Black members, "she harrumphed and showed me a picture of Phebe Lane as an elderly woman," he says. "The whole story about her sister Betty is well-known among Shakers, but they don't like to advertise or talk about it."

That's surprising because the event makes the religious commune, which stood against slavery and claimed to uphold egalitarian values, look pretty good. The opera's title refers to the community's ideal, which viewed Black and women members as peers first, and everything else second, he says, so they adhered to their creed in many ways.

Controversial upon their transplantation from England in the late 1700s, the Shaker movement reached its peak in the mid-1800s, with more than a dozen self-contained compounds, some of which are now museums. One practitioner hangs on at Sabbathday Shaker Village in Maine.

The Shakers are the "longest-lasting, self-sustaining religious or utopian society in American history," says Superville Sovak.

Beyond their anti-slavery stance, the Shaking Quakers, named for their fervid mode of worship, put the covenant above everything. "Once you signed that document, you handed over all your property and lost your identity," he says. "They opposed private property and the nuclear family, so their value system questioned what made America, America."

The backstory of the court case dates to 1802, when Prime Lane, father of Betty and Phebe, relocated his family to a Shaker village at Watervliet, across the river from Albany. He left the fold eight years later, but the daughters, ages 25 and 23, decided to stay.

Prime sued the Shakers to return Betty, referring to her as his slave. Under New York law at the time, children born to an enslaved woman inherited the condition of bondage, and anyone harboring someone else's human property had an obligation to return the person or be fined.

Betty somewhat fit the bill. Phebe did not, because Prime had emancipated her mother, Hannah, before Phebe was born.

Why the father left the commune and initiated a lawsuit remains a mystery, says Superville Sovak. Eventually, the court ruled in favor of the religious order, and the daughters stayed with them for the rest of their lives.

Lane v. Shakers "busts binaries when we think of history, which is so nuanced," he says. "It helps us look at things in a way that is not simplistic and is a truer version of what the messy past is really like."

The Yard is located at 4 Hanna Lane in Beacon; tickets are $25 at dub.sh/black-shakers. The actors for the July 24 performance, which begins at 7 p.m., are Aviva Jaye (Phebe), Onome (Betty) and Melvin Tunstall III (Prime). Superville Sovak and Alison McNulty are the narrators,...