Elliot Norton Interviews; Harry Belafonte

National educational television presents Cari Belafonte with Elliot Norton. During one of his recent appearances in Boston, Mr. Belafonte talked with Mr. Norton who is drama critic for the Boston record American and Sunday advertiser. In the theater, there are only four or five men so gifted that they can hold an audience on their own talents and personality for a full evening. Victor Bogak can do this in Sochen Shavagie and Sochen Danny Kaye and Sochen Harry Belafonte. There are only three, I don't know any others who can do this particular thing. There's almost nobody else with the combination of talent and personality and showmanship. And since Harry Belafonte is here in town this week at the Donnelly Memorial Theatre,

we invited him to come here to discuss just how he does do this. Before I present him, I tell you briefly just what he does. First of all, he sings, and this is basic. The heart of his show is music. He sings perhaps 20, 25 songs. He sings a wide variety of songs, songs of different countries. He sings comic songs, sad songs, sentimental songs. And he sings some sophisticated songs. Parenthetically, he likes to say that because this is Boston, when the songs are sophisticated, he sings only the King James version. He has with him an excellent, large orchestra in the pit. He has a small orchestra of remarkable specialists on the stage with him. He has three male singers and a girl named Amanda Ambrose, who has a very unusual talent of her own.

Mr. Belafonte is known to some of his admirers as a folk singer. He's known in the theatre to some as a personality. He's both. Seems to me he's most remarkable perhaps for showmanship. He knows exactly how to stir an audience to any move and keep them in that mood for just as long as he likes. He knows how to make them feel sentimental, for instance. And at any time he chooses he can break that mood and substitute something else. He manipulates the audience, and I think in a good way, not for his own ends, but for their pleasure. I'm going to ask him first of all, Mr. Belafonte, how do you plan one of these shows? What goes into the planning of these shows? The first thing that goes into the planning of the show for me is, of course, what is their new and challenging and curious for me to do?

What kind of song, what kind of new rhythm, what new language, what new technique in the use of the vocal instrument? After going through that, I then become concerned as to what will be its effect on an audience. What I have found is to be satisfactory to my own limitations or capabilities. Not always am I successful in the choice of individual songs, but I try to give a total effect in the evening that will permit most of the audience to at least find enough material that they can identify with, because I don't believe that all of the songs that I sing are songs that are acceptable to everybody and everybody likes. But the most important thing for me at this point, and what I have tried to effect in the theater, is some form, some attitude that is challenging, that is provocative, to take a song that might have had a traditional concept or conduct, and to turn that song

around to the point that some people terribly provoke. I am often aware of people who are involved in the field of folk music who believe that I am one of its greatest, one of its greatest disasters, because I did take a small song that traditionally has been strummed with one guitar or a lute or a banjo, and I will find an necessity to give it a enormous orchestra, or I will take a song that has been done by an enormous orchestra and wind up doing it with a lute or a small guitar. I don't do this just because I'm looking for something to provoke, for the sense of being provocative, but the theater is a never-ending challenge to me, it is the thing that defies me the most, it is the most illusory, it is the most disillusioning, it is the most

provoking, frustrating, happy, joyous thing, and it's one thing that does all of these things to me, keep me in a continual state of turmoil, and I never really become frightened about the theater until 830 or 840 at night when I walk out on the stage in that minute or two before I must step out to face a new audience on a new situation, I am from time to time very much aware that the audience comes in with its own problems, with its own sense of self and what it wants, and because I am forever changing my material and changing and trying to change my image, I keep wondering will they accept this new thing, and I don't know that I know all of the things that go on inside of me, some of it is terribly mystic to me, it's terribly mystic when I watch Tony Quinn as an actor, it's terribly mystic

when I watch pretty much, because these are my friends, these are men that I spend a great deal of time with in New York, and we talk and I know what it is that they do technically, I see it, I see that they have moved here or done this, but there's a spirituality, there is something that defies definition, that makes them what they are, and I keep trying to wonder when is this thing going to fail me, because it is something I cannot control, I can control walking on stage, I can control whether the music is loud or soft, I can control how fast it's somehow slow, but there is something that is beyond me, this beyond definition, and that is what happens that goes from me to the audience and in turn from the audience back to me, and this is the area that keeps me really upside down. That's fascinating, because you know, last Saturday night I sat there and watched you come on stage, now you said you were nervous before you walked on, and yet you seemed

absolutely under control, and because you were absolutely under control I think this was a reason the audience was held at once, they were immediately responsive, and yet you were inside at this particular point, you were agitated, not calm, not serene, you seemed to be serene and controlled, you were agitated, were you disturbed until you got into it? I was not only agitated, but what happens is that when I walk out on stage I am aware of the courtesy that must be paid, you know, that you must bow to the audience when they applaud, at least in the technique of what we do, we wouldn't do that in a drama, of course, or in a musical bookshelf, but I walk out and I say, well the first thing that I, you know, the first thing that comes automatically is that there's applause, as I walk on our stage and I take a bow. From that moment, until I have my first spoken word when

I then talk to the audience, I am not aware of audience, but I do become terribly aware of the material, and as I perform the material and I am singing the lyrics and I'm going to a new musical note or something, I'm wondering as I go through it, have I done the best thing in the service of this material and I'm always in doubt. I'm not in doubt about I feel secure in terms of, I mean the audiences have through the years made me know that they appreciate or like me, so I'm not frightened of being disliked, I'm not frightened of anything other than that thing which might fail me some night, which will not, and if I knew how to define it, I would certainly, you know, use it to the hilt, but Tony Quinn can't define it, Paul Newman can't define it, Sidney Poitier can't define it, there's a something that happens when you walk out and it's almost, that's what makes every night

the first night, that's what makes it, a lot of people say, well don't you get bored time and time again doing the same song or coming out the same way and having to make the same moves, from their point of view the physiological might be, you know, very pedestrian, but this thing that goes for you every night, this undefinable something is what makes every night a new night, makes every audience a new challenge, makes every moment something to really grapple with, and I become terribly concerned on a very personal basis and a Tony Quinn for instance refers to it as the great need for loneliness, that is, that is the need for loneliness, or the need for that moment to be alone, and he says that it's prevalent among painters and prevalent among writers and prevalent among composers because they're able to go into a room, deal only with themselves and their craft and their creative powers, it's very difficult for the performing artists to be that because his, his experience

acceptance finally is based upon what happens when he places his way as before in audience and we have no alternative but to be accepted in our lifetime, you see, if we're not accepted as, as actors or as thing is now, we're not going to be accepted a hundred years from now, a painter might have that good fortune or you might feel he's ahead of this time. And this thing called audience and this thing called loneliness, played, played an important part in the, in the machine of creative development because I go away, I'm alone, I am provoked and I am in turmoil about it and I want to know am I right and I know I can't be all things to all people so I try to be true unto the thing that I feel most daily about and sometimes it's very hard to communicate to people because they have no frame of reference or they just don't care to believe but, you know, I've had good fortune economically, it's not

my pursuit any longer, I've had approval, that's not my pursuit any longer. My pursuit is a certain kind of a profoundness, a certain kind of something that I'm looking for that will help me to go beyond myself and no one can do it for me. I have to go into that moment of loneliness, into that contemplation and work it out and most of the times I never know exactly what it is that I'm working on or exactly what it is that I'm looking for because I am still trying to find a definition for that thing which has made me go to the audience and the audience back to me and it carries it almost like a life in its own and although I'm carrying it and I know I don't want to violate it, I don't really know what it is and if I could find some way of getting a little closer to that then perhaps the next time I go on on tour I might have a whole new thing as an actor or as a performer or as a singer. Well that's an astonishing thing, now what you're telling me if I get this right is that

when you attacked that first song, I had the feeling that you were absorbed and that particular song. What you're saying if I understand it is that you isolate yourself in effect with that material, like the pain it does with his canvas and you work on that song but you know that at the same time you're projecting that the audience is listening but that your concern is with that material and how you approach it and how you render that material it's all yourself and yet and the intangible is how you're able to do this and keep an isolation and at the same time create and maintain a contact with the audience. Exactly. Well that's a fantastic thing because this is exactly the effect that comes through and yet you are able somehow or other to maintain that contact and to communicate your own feelings, your own mood and to make the audience respond they share your mood as a matter of fact. Isn't this so?

Yes. And don't ask me why. And you don't know how you do that. In other words all you do is approach the song, would you say you act the song, I had the feeling that you do that mule skin or the first one for example, that you're concerned with the problem of the mule skin or at that particular time and you're living with it in song. Is this true? That's exactly correct. You see there's one device that I find it necessary to use most of the songs that I sing and with a blackout sometimes it fades out sometimes it goes out very sharply but it ends because not for the audience is benefit or to say now the song is over but rather it's a device that permits me to as swiftly as possible mechanically move myself out of the thing that I have just finished with in order to catapult myself as swiftly as possible into the mood that is coming next. So that when I have those pauses on stage and people are wondering what's going on I'm

not pausing because the music isn't right or I'm not pausing because something is technically incorrect. I am pausing because I have now to move myself from where I was into what the next image and the next thing is and it requires a moment of preparation. If you're working in a book show you have dialogue going for you, you have the plot going for you. I have no plot in order to move people through these varied experiences emotionally. It requires me to experience those emotions at the same time. It's amazing that you can do that to this extent and still maintain that contact and stimulate the same mood in them and then what you're saying in my terms would be that you need that moment black out to readjust to move from the one mode into the other. This is where the technique comes in because knowing that I'm going into the next mood and in order to give the audience a swift and introduction as possible into what is coming will determine whether I bow, whether I smile, whether I turn my back on them, whether

I turn to the side, whether I just get a gaze because pending on that physical projection it then arms them into what is coming next. So if I smile it might be something in humor. If I get a little crankish sometimes when I walk about and whatnot, the little silly things that I do sometimes on stage, it is to set the audience up because I try to keep talking to a minimum. I'm in the theater from musical experience in the evening for myself and for the audience. And I hate long introductions to say this was this was this, once in a while I do it when I feel that I have not yet worked out a way as an actor to be able to communicate this thought to the audience. I must rely on some kind of post script, you know. Most of the time I try to do it through some physical thing, through some character, a kind that then leads them into the song and gives them an immediate frame of reference and that way shift them emotionally.

Well how do you determine that, for instance, I'm thinking about that song that you're seeing there, the lyric seems to be almost entirely why and why and why you walk around with the rope trailing you. And that seems to suggest the way you carry the rope and lug it around seems to suggest that you're being a little bit mischievous. How did you work that particular device out? Well this was something that came out in the workshop because in the workshop I said I don't know. Being an actor's workshop in New York? Yes, an actor's studio. And the actor's studio. And I said with this song and it's so short, one doesn't even feel that it would have required that much concern, you know, perhaps it should have been done more simply, but if it were more simple for me, not that it shouldn't have simplicity as its basis, but if it were more simple for me, then I wouldn't be able to feel the challenge, but you know, I have just finished a song called Try to Remember, which is a very philosophical song about life and the vintage and the middle years and the young years and the years of snow and without a hurt, the heart is hollow and things that, you know, quite broad.

And now I go into a song that is basically a children's song. I don't want to stop and say to the audience, my next song is going to be a song about the great curiosity of children and the questions that they ask, because then I am losing an opportunity to do what the theater is supposed to do, relate through action. So I then shift the entire physical being of my body and walk with my toes turned in a little and I kind of like amble along, like a little boy would do, moving from one side of the stage to the other, and I kind of take a deep breath and gaze out and like get, you know, a little thing going. And then the first thing I say is, why and why and why and why, and the audience doesn't quite know what's coming except that it's terribly ridiculous for the moment. And then in the middle of the song, I then play the part of the child asking why with the questions and then playing the part of the father who has to answer these questions

with great frustrations, because a little boy refuses to go to sleep. And it's a marvelous challenge for me. I have not perfected it. I haven't done all of the things with it that I would like to be able to do, but then again, what I'm capable of doing is beyond me. So I must go back to study. But this business of the dragging the rope seemed to me to be so much in character to me. To me, it's my cart. Yeah. To me, it's my cart. Oh, is that what it's supposed to be? Yeah, I just drag that little thing along like a little boy, I see little boys dragging things off, a piece of rope or a box or a, and I turn that instrument into something that helps me get into it. You know, I'd like to maybe even skip rope one night, but I think that's going a little too far. Yeah. Well, now this is a peculiar thing, because I had the sense of the small boy. I knew you were dragging the rope and I puzzled because I couldn't figure why did the rope suggest to me something about the nature of the song. This, you say, is exactly what you're trying to do, is suggest in action, or in music.

Instead of having to say in words, this is a little boy pulling a cart around. Now, in the act of studio, did you say you worked this out, that you worked with a microphone in order to, and the rope in order to find the right way to qualify that song? Yes, because I went through many things. I thought of sitting down and I thought of, and this I'd go with all of the songs. Each song has worked out of the delivery has worked out in this particular way. And unlike what many people have thought, you know, like for instance, I maintain that I'm not really a folk singer, as much as I am a singer in the performing arts. And I use folk music as the great basses from my dramatic feeling, because mainly I'm an actor. That's what I studied to be in my chance to be singing in the theatre was luck, and not by early childhood calculations. And whenever I get the material, I don't treat it as a folk singer. I treat it as an actor, and I therefore call up on the things that will help me best

project the drama of what it is that I would like to project in that song. Perhaps, you know, I like Pete Siegel very much. I like big-bill brands in, well, a lot of people, a lot of people may not know Woody Guthrie and Josh White and Lead Billie, all the guys that I knew and admired, they were the traditional. But when I began to make my approach to this music, the thing that brought me to it was I saw great drama in its lyrics. Great drama, if it was comedy or if it was tragedy or if it was, you know, whatever. And it challenged me as an actor. I couldn't find work in the theatre as an actor because of all of the things that were difficult. Well, first of all, for actors in general, coming out of school, it was very difficult. I studied with Aaron Piscotta in Lee Strasburg in the early years. And when I came out of the theatre, not only was it difficult as an actor, but as a Negro. And I got a great need to continue my life in the performing arts. And I seized upon this as a technique to give me a life where I didn't have to wait

for a play or wait for this. But in the workshop, whenever I approach a new concert or a new series of things or who will I work with or how large would it be, would it be a choir, would it be this, would it be that? I'd go after it because, unfortunately, I don't have another art form like my own with which to even get cues from. It's either book shows. If I do concerts all of the traditional sense, then it's like the way Marian Anderson or Liam Dean Price or George London would do it, which is the classical grand piano. And I come in with concert, but it's theatre, because I do have seen me, I believe in lights. I like to see the stage come alive. All of these things are worked out in the workshop. What do I want to say? Where do we go drama? Where do we go humor? What do we do in terms of an introduction of a new piece of a tear from the fine country that I visited? I try to take the people on as wide an experience as possible. And it all happens in that workshop.

And the one thing that I'm getting back to as soon as I leave Boston is five months of work, I would be seeing it really, really just in the workshop again. That's interesting because this is another thing that came through to me Saturday night that you were acting, these songs that you were creating the character. And you sang the Mule Skinner, for instance, that you were in that character, that you were feeling for him, feeling as he might feel. Then you sang that Israeli song, and I had the few said you had visited Israel and sung there. I had the feeling that you must have heard people sing there and had been moved by them to a feeling of communion with them. And having caught that, you were trying to reproduce it as an acting singer. That's interesting because this is what comes through, but what comes through in the audience? You know, isn't always what is going on in the act of said that this is a reason why I think the whole experience was moving.

You're working to create character. What do you do at the end now when you're singing that, Matilda? It's fascinated me because I wondered how long you could keep the audience going. You bring the audience in, you bring them in sections. And you seem to know exactly how long you could play around with that audience. And I kept having the feeling now I wonder if he brings in one more section, will he become bored? But when you stopped, they were hollering for more. They were screaming for more. So you had time that exactly right, and it must around 20 or 25 minutes. How do you know, is this a matter of ear knowing or is it the response or what? How do you know just how long? Because if you dragged that out three minutes too long, you'd be in trouble on the show it'd be in trouble, wouldn't you? How do you know to do it 20 or 25 minutes and not 12? This fascinates me.

Well, I think the most dangerous thing any artists can do is to become directly involved with the audience, yet it is the most exciting experience of all, it really is. While I'm on stage, while I am singing the songs, barring some kind of uncivilized conduct and total discard to see the audience really has no alternative, but to either walk out quietly, I hope, or to sit there in the courtesy of the theatre to watch what the performance is. But once you step across that fourth wall and then you say, well, come, let's all be together. Now they're on their own, and once you've invited them, they're now equal participants in something and they have an opinion of their own. And this is where that undefinable thing comes again, because I am instinctively responding to what they are permitting me to take in terms of an advantage of them. There is some, I poked one of them.

If someone comes up or some section comes up and does not sing, I must be able to utilize that moment and turn it into a positive thing and to keep the momentum going, because they have been sometimes when whole sections are just, you know, really. They don't sing. Oh, they just kind of sit there and would like to, or it wouldn't like to, or whatever, and you have to be able to manipulate them. Yeah, but how do you know? This is what I'm saying. Is it the ear, it's part training, of course. My part of it, of course, is the tradition of having done this song, which is the obvious. But the other thing is based on what has happened through the total evening, where did they laugh? Are they terribly sophisticated in the area to a certain kind of humor? Because from night to night, the things I say will change only because of things that have happened earlier in the performance, which have indicated to me that this audience is very hip, so to speak, or this audience is not quite in that groove. This audience is a little more conservative.

This is a little bit more liberal. Oh, I can tell that this audience is a very young audience. Now I can tell that this audience are elderly people. And with this knowledge, which has, I have been gathering in the whole performance, I have then applied myself accordingly to the mood of that audience at that performance. In other words, you've been listening all the time. So the better time you come to Matilda, you know, just what mood they're in, what kind of audience, and then how far you can go with that. That's just technical. But it's partly, it's largely a matter of experience to isn't it? You wouldn't be able to do, you weren't able to do that the first time you ever did Matilda with an audience. First of all, I find Matilda to be as a song, one of the dullest in my repertoire. That's all. I really do. It is musically, it goes nowhere in music. It is lyrically, it says nothing, lyrically, a girl took my money and went to Venezuela. That is the lyric. There's no poetry, there's no great play on words.

And I remember once being asked to sing this at a performance that I was giving at a nightclub in the early years, and the people began to respond to it and clap their heads. I'm terribly sorry we come to the end of that time. I wish we could go another hour. Thank you, everyone, thank you very much. Thank you. This conversation between Harry Belafonte and Elliott Norton, drama critic of the Boston Record American and Sunday Advertiser, was recorded in the studios of WGBH TV Boston. This is N-E-T National Educational Television.