The “honest history of Atlanta” gets a vivid retelling through music, this Thursday at the Mable House Barnes Amphitheatre in Mableton. “Phoenix Rising,” a new show by the Atlanta Women’s Chorus, explores Atlanta’s past from its early settlers all the way to OutKast, through a diverse program of music ranging from folkloric to modern pop. Artistic director of the Atlanta Women’s Chorus Dr. Melissa Arasi joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share the origins and intentions of this unique musical journey through history.
Dr. Arasi’s idea for the show came to her as early as 2017, but once it was fully developed, its premiere was thwarted by the COVID pandemic. The Atlanta Women’s Chorus held out until now to perform “Phoenix Rising,” eschewing the option to try and rework the show for a virtual online version. “We have video vignettes and a script that runs through the show along with the music, and all of it was planned, shot; everything was ready to go, and it just didn’t feel like the right topic to try to do on a virtual choir presentation,” said Arasi. “We were very connected to this material, and the story that we were trying to portray needed to be in person… Those facial expressions and personal connection really make a difference in telling the story.”
Speaking about her own personal reckoning with systemic racism in recent years, Arasi brought home the show’s central message – that being forthright about the true history of the South is crucial in moving forward. “It’s interesting how timely it feels now to be looking at, maybe, stories I learned as a child in school that weren’t exactly the way history played out,” said Arasi. “I went back thinking about what my Georgia history class really taught me, and I really was enamored of the whole ‘Gone With the Wind’ era. I remember reading the book and getting caught up in this Antebellum beauty and wonder, and I really, honestly, as a child, did not realize all of this was about slaves, and the civil war was about slavery, and enslaved humans.”
She continued, “Even though as an adult, I started realizing these things, I don’t think I had really come to terms with that inner struggle – that perhaps I wasn’t unbiased; perhaps I wasn’t really seeing the whole picture. So I started trying to really educate myself. I felt like I was really behind.”
The video elements incorporated into “Phoenix Rising” were partly inspired from Arasi’s admiration of images at the Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Museum, telling Atlanta’s story from the perspective of a child. “We’ve written a script that kind of goes through the eyes of a child… how they see Atlanta, and their parents talking them through what maybe happened in the past, and what they may not exactly understand in the way that it happened.”
