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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you were going to stage a Juneteenth Eve celebration at Lincoln Center, what would you call it? How about, To a Garden Luxuriously Verdant (Enameled with Countless Flowerings)? With a name like that, you might not be surprised to hear that they're describing it as a multi-genre, multicultural experiential, site-specific, evening-long, full-campus celebration of the fight for a more free America.

I'd say that's enough right there to launch a conversation with the artist who conceptualized is curating and will be a lead performer in the event, the artist who Lincoln Center calls the singular creative force that is Carl Hancock Rux. Carl Hancock Rux is a poet, playwright, recording artist, essayist, and, let's not forget, radio journalist. He was last on this show in February to talk about the 70th anniversary of Ralph Ellison's classic novel, Invisible Man winning the National Book Award. Carl, thanks for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Carl Hancock Rux: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll preview the actual performance and talk about some of the other top performers involved as we go. Let's start on the concept and your relationship to it, To a Garden Luxuriously Verdant (Enameled with Countless Flowerings). I couldn't resist just to say that out loud one more time. Would you like to just explain the title and where it comes from for our listeners?

Carl Hancock Rux: Sure. It's an excerpt from a poem by the Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camões, who was a Portuguese poet. He's the Shakespeare of Portugal. Well, I shouldn't say the Shakespeare, but he's definitely considered the national poet widely celebrated in Portugal. He was a man of inclusion, and he was a man about whose work was dedicated to multiculturalism. His travels, his studies, his interests during the 15th century was all about celebrating otherness and celebrating otherness as a oneness of humanity.

That poem, for me, blew my mind because it was about how he just used a garden as an example of something very beautiful that can be filled with many different flowers and many different fauna and flora, but yet we can all still live together, and we can all work together to thrive on one land. We all still need water and air and all those things that we need to thrive. I wanted to celebrate this year, the multiculturalism of Juneteenth, in a way that I've not seen it done before. That was really my intention.

Brian Lehrer: I see that the work that you are presenting Sunday night is inspired by two things, the To a Garden poem, but also what you call Harriet Tubman's Recurring Dream. What was Harriet Tubman's recurring dream?

Carl Hancock Rux: Harriet Tubman, this is a great example. Harriet Tubman had a multicultural dream. She was, as many people know, afflicted with visions throughout her lifetime, certainly because of the accident that she had as a child. She had a recurring dream, and one of the recurring dreams that she had was that she dreamed that there was a big green line. On the other side of that line, she says she saw beautiful white ladies holding their arms out to her, beckoning toward her. She wanted to cross the green line to get to the other side of these beautiful white ladies, but she could never get to the other side.

This is before she even started her emancipation work. This is before she started her abolition work. She had this constant recurring dream. There's no explanation really about why her dream was about white women on the other side of the line, or who these white women were, or what they might have been. We're only left to, I guess, decide for ourselves what that might have meant or what the symbols might have meant. One of the things that was astounding to me is to find out about how much the Scottish anti-slavery movement aided and helped and financed Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad mission during her life in times.

In fact, there was a woman who lived in Scotland and had never come to America, never went to America at all during her entire lifetime. She sent money when she read about Harriet Tubman trying to free these slaves. She sent money here to America to someone hoping that perhaps they might be able to get that money to her. That did happen. That woman, by the way, was a member of the Scottish women's anti-slavery movement, as well as the temperance movement.

I like to think, in an odd way, that Harriet Tubman saw this woman even from her childhood or that knew that there was somebody all the way in Scotland that cared enough about her freedom that they would send money, and not send money once, but send money more than once and dedicate their lives, it was a Scottish Quaker, by the way, and then would commit their lives to her freedom. It takes a village, really.

Brian Lehrer: We just call the holiday Juneteenth usually, but as the Lincoln Center press release reminds us, it has a longer official name now since Congress passed and President Biden signed the bill making it a federal holiday. The fuller name, for listeners who don't know, is Juneteenth Independence Day, or even more technically under the law, Juneteenth National Independence Day.

To remind people of the basics, it celebrates the day more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation from President Lincoln in 1863, when the last enslaved people, specifically in Galveston, Texas, actually learned of their freedom, not till after the Civil War ended in 1865. The name, I actually wonder if your performance, or even your own thinking, consider the importance of the phrase "Independence Day" there, which is also the official name of the holiday on the 4th of July.

Carl Hancock Rux: I think it's a greater example of independence. It's arguable, but certainly, one could say that the 4th of July is a celebration of a war and bombs bursting in air that gave us independence, but what greater independence is it that can be achieved when we realize that you really don't have to burst bombs in air. You really just have to let someone be free, or you have to put aside your own political or social values in a way, put them aside to recognize the humanity in someone else.

That independence is also about inclusivity and about multiculturalism, and about the impact of respecting difference and withholding the demand for assimilation into a dominant culture. That's independence to me. Independence is about multiculturalism. For me, independence, the greatest way to celebrate it is for me to look at you and for you to look at me and understand that we are both flesh and blood, and we breathe air, and we live in the same garden.

Brian Lehrer: I saw that you released an artist's statement on what you all will be doing at Lincoln Center on Sunday night, and part of it says, "Juneteenth occupies a special place in the hearts of many African Americans, but the day is increasingly celebrated by people of all ethnicities amid an expanding conversation about race." I read that from you, and I thought, "Well, there's a whiff of optimism in that." Interesting, perhaps, because optimism seems to be in fairly short supply these days.

I'm curious if you mean to convey that when you refer to Juneteenth being increasingly celebrated by people of all ethnicities, and to an expanding conversation about race, that you are expressing a bit of optimism.

Carl Hancock Rux: I'm expressing optimism and I'm expressing experience. When I directed the first Juneteenth event at Lincoln Center which was two years ago, the audience was predominantly white. It wasn't an all-Black audience at all. When I was asked by Lincoln Center to create Juneteenth or Juneteenth programming, I had no idea what they wanted me to do, but I did ask them, "Will you allow me to do it the way that I'd like to do it?" They said, "Yes."

What I invited people into was an experience. That experience, which takes over the entire campus of Lincoln Center, was a performance exhibit that was open to all, and that's who came. Everyone came. It wasn't just Black people who showed up at all. In fact, it was predominantly not Black people who came, but I would say what we consider to be white people who came. The same was true of last year as well.

I think that it's me being optimistic, but it's also me also observing. I'm observing, I'm seeing that I think that people are beginning to understand and beginning to really study or unearth the multiculturalism of Juneteenth and its own history, which is vast.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about the performances coming up on Sunday night when Lincoln Center calls it a multi-genre experiential full campus event. Give us the full campus part of that first. Is it in multiple venues within Lincoln Center?

Carl Hancock Rux: It's not inside any one building. You walk across the entire campus. The very first thing is there's an installation of flowers all throughout Lincoln Center, throughout the entire campus outdoors. This year, we're decorating the entire campus in flowers, that's a theme, again, to go back to this notion of the poem. You'll see a procession of people dressed in floral garments.

You will see people who are representative of African dignitaries with red umbrellas and red garments almost like ancients, speaking to a future of what happened to the African people who were taken away and brought to America, and speaking with, I guess, hope and almost a prayerful expectation for their souls.

There'll be classical music performed by Alicia Hall Moran and Aaron Diehl. There's also a dance by Ronald K. Brown and EVIDENCE. There's a Native American actually, I should say, Afro-Native American performer, the wonderful Martha Redbone, who's an incredible singer, who's going to represent the relationship between Native Americans and Blacks in America and that fight for emancipation and also what happened to those two different communities as well.

You're going to see a big concert in Damrosch Park by Burnt Sugar, the orchestra, which is a rock band that was formed by Greg Tate and Vernon Reid some years ago. It'll be conducted by Vernon Reid, the Grammy-Award-winning rock musician. It'll be a multicultural rock band, and they're going to perform songs.

Brian Lehrer: That sounds like too much fun. Then at 9:30 it says, and we just have 15 seconds, that you're having a silent disco. What's a silent disco?

Carl Hancock Rux: It's where you put headphones on, and there's a DJ. The DJ plays music and you listen to the music on your headphones and you dance together. That's what it is. It's a great way of respecting the community, who'd like to go to bed maybe at seven o'clock or 10:30 at night.

Brian Lehrer: All right. To a Garden Luxuriously Verdant (Enameled With Countless Flowerings) this Sunday night Juneteenth Eve event all over Lincoln Center. Am I right? Free, but-

Carl Hancock Rux: It's all free.

Brian Lehrer: -people can just show up or make reservations at lincolncenter.org, I see. Also I mentioned for Lincoln Center that today begins their summer programming at various venues, some of it's happening right now outdoors there. Carl Hancock Rux curating Sunday night's event, thank you so much for coming on. It sounds really exciting.

Carl Hancock Rux: Thank you so much for having me.

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