A Citywide Retrospective for the Poet and Playwright Sekou Sundiata

Sekou Sundiata, the poet, playwright, performer and educator who died in 2007 after a career featuring his signature themes of race, power and identity, will be the subject of a seven-month citywide retrospective, set to begin in April.

The retrospective, titled “Blink Your Eyes: Sekou Sundiata Revisited” (after the title of a Sundiata poem), is being curated and produced by MAPP International Productions, which produced Mr. Sundiata’s last three major pieces. To be officially announced on Tuesday, the retrospective is a collaboration among more than 50 artists, educational institutions and 18 cultural organizations, including Lincoln Center, Harlem Stage, the Apollo Theater and Summer Stage at Central Park. A schedule of performances and events can be found at www.sekousundiata.org.

Meant to honor Mr. Sundiata’s work and his legacy ofmarrying activism and art, the retrospective includes dialogues, performances and restaging of such work as “The Circle Unbroken is A Hard Bop,’’  from 1992, and his final work  “the 51st (dream) state,” from 2006.  That last work presented a mosaic of poetry, music, dance and videotaped interviews that explores what it means to be an American after 9/11.

“This year would have been his 65th birthday,” Ann Rosenthal, the executive director of MAPP International, said Monday of the retrospective’s timing. “Since he passed, we‘ve continued working with other artists interested in working in the intersection of civic engagement and high-quality art making.  He embraced it all - it’s not just his performances but what he did as an activist and educator.”

The retrospective will include poetry and music performed by Craig Harris, Carl Hancock Rux, Regina Carter, Nona Hendryx, Tamar Kali, Will Powe! r and Rakim among others.  A catalogue will feature selections of his work and commissioned essays and poems by Greg Tate, Kimiko Hahn Amiri Baraka and Jane Lazarre. Many of the events are free, although some will require advance reservations.

At the time of his death, at the age of 58, Mr. Sundiata was a professor in the writing program of Eugene Lang College of New School University. His work was performed widely in this country and abroad, staged by organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and theSpoleto Festival U.S.A.

As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, Mr. Sundiata’s work “ranged from poems performed in the style of an oral epic to musical, dance and dramatic works infused with jazz, blues, funk and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In general, as he once said in a television interview, it entailed “the whole idea of text and noise, cadences and pauses.”’