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Her memory is creaky, Dwania Kyles insisted, and most of the photographs that help unlock it are stored in her computer. But recently, sitting in a warren of rooms in Harlem as the light outside faded, she had a rush of recollections about her family and the night that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come to dinner.
Kyles and Thomas Allen Harris, a documentary filmmaker, had donned white gloves to thumb through photographs of her parents in high school.
“My parents left the promised land to jump into the lion’s den,” she said of their move from Chicago to Memphis, Tenn., to join the civil rights movement.
On the evening in 1968 that King was expected at their home for soul food, her father, the Rev. Samuel B. Kyles, ended up with him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where King was felled by an assassin.
Harris and Kyles, a 55-year-old wellness consultant and songwriter who lives in Harlem, were in his office ferreting out information for the filmmaker’s Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project. Since 2009, Harris has collected photographs and stories from families, putting those and filmed interviews onto his website.
Now, Harris is taking his show onto the stage, presenting the stories he’s collected to a live audience using interactive media and old-fashioned storytelling. On Sunday afternoon, after dry runs around the country, the show will have its debut at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. (The event will be streamed live to the website.) At Harlem Stage and in future reunion cities, the enlarged photographs and accompanying stories will be presented to audiences who will be invited to trade family histories, ask questions and even identify people and locations. The project will also work as community history, with its glances at the places and people that define neighbourhoods.
“It’s survivors and ‘firsts,”’ Harris said of the people he is documenting, few of them celebrities. “It’s the stories in history books and films about civil rights.”
As a kind of curator/master of ceremonies, Harris, who has made two acclaimed documentaries, “The 12 Disciples of Nelson Mandela,” about South African exiles who were part of the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement, and “E Minha Cara/That’s My Face,” about spirituality, looks to figure out which stories enlarge and provide context for many aspects of black life, from immigration to education to military service.
“We are living with gold – one person in Atlanta came with a truckload of images dating back to the 1850s,” he said.
Photographs and stories can also be directly uploaded to the website, which features interviews with scholars, news about family reunions and images by black photographers.
A Harvard graduate who is in his ‘40s, grew up in the Bronx and spent time in East Africa, Harris had long encouraged fans of his work to collect their own family stories, as he has done in his deeply personal films. It struck him that social media could be used to archive and share the results. His younger brother, Lyle Ashton Harris, is a prominent photographer and artist known for work that fuses aesthetic considerations and sociopolitical observation.
“All of my work is about identity, about how we represent ourselves to ourselves,” Thomas Allen Harris said. “We take grandma for granted. We need to understand that instead of looking outside ourselves for value, we can look inside.”
On Wednesday through Friday, Harris will set up shop at the Gatehouse so people can bring him their family photographs and other documents. The photographs that Harris selects will be digitized and put onto a DVD for their owner. All will be shown as part of a slide show at Harlem Stage, and some will be expanded into an interactive film for the website.
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