BLACKSBURG, Jan. 13, 2000—Will Mae West or Castro or Cole Porter show up? Could be when the party is the Harlem Renaissance Costume Ball.

The Harlem Renaissance class taught by Nikki Giovanni at Virginia Tech is kicking off Black History Month by hosting a recreation of the Opportunity Magazine dinner that officially began the Harlem Renaissance. The event, open to the public at no charge, will be held Tuesday, Feb. 1, at the Donaldson Brown Commonwealth Dining Room, 7-10 p.m. The only criteria for admission is that everyone must be dressed as someone who would have been alive between 1919 and 1929 no matter their age at that time—and that everyone come with an attitude of fun, Giovanni said. A $50 prize will be given to the person with the best costume and the person or group that came the farthest for the ball.

"You cannot choose to come as Booker T. Washington because he died before 1919, but you can be Helen Keller or George Gershwin or Duke Ellington or Jackie Kennedy or Zora Neale Hurston," Giovanni said. "You cannot be Harriet Tubman because she died in 1913; you can’t be Scott Joplin because he died in 1917. But you can be Mao Zedong and you can be John Kennedy or Helen Keller or anyone else alive during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. Anyone. From anywhere."

The original Opportunity Magazine event was a sit-down dinner with brilliant scholar Alain Locke as host. "The room was filled with the older, more established, and somewhat richer white American literary lions and the younger literary aspirants of The New Negro Movement," Giovanni said. "There was a formal program, and many business cards were passed around."

Giovanni’s re-creation event will be a stand-up dinner with stations around the room for "The Opportunity" to meet costumed luminaries. For example, there will be a W.E.B. DuBois station, a Langston Hughes station, a Jessie Fauset station, and a Zora Neale Hurston station. In addition, there will be a jazz station "just to soothe our souls," Giovanni said. Each station will feature "food, drink, and conversation."

A special feature of the ball will be Carol Crawford Smith’s portrayal of Josephine Baker, the great singer/dancer who was awarded La Croix de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle for her work with the French Underground during World War II. Crawford Smith is director of The Center of Dance in Blacksburg and was a principal soloist ballerina with the internationally renowned Dance Theatre of Harlem for 10 years. As a performer, instructor, and educator of dance for 17 years, she is dedicated to providing venues and opportunities to experience excellence in dance.

"As a dancer and performing artist," Smith said, "I usually use the vehicle of dance and the art of dance to tell history or reiterate history through movement. I think the performing arts, especially dance, are important tools for educating. I’ll be illustrating the history of African Americans during the Renaissance through my performing arts."

The Opportunity Reader and The Crisis Reader, both magazines that formed the backbone of the Harlem Renaissance, have recently been published in book form, Giovanni said. "There are also many new biographies and chronologies such as The Black New Yorkers, which recently have been issued," she said. "The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, George and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Mae West, among many, many others, were partners in bringing a new vitality to American life."

Nikki Giovanni, Virginia Tech professor and world-renowned poet, won the NAACP Image Award for literature for her book Love Poems and the prestigious Langston Hughes Award for 1996 for distinguished contributions to arts and letters. Giovanni published her first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk, in 1968 and the second, Black Judgment, in 1969, becoming a voice for the black-power movement.?Giovanni also has written poetry for youngsters, including the books Spin a Soft Black Song in 1971 and The Sun is So Quiet in 1996; but she continued writing about the issues of the day in works such as My House, published in 1972, and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, published in 1978. Her works also include books of essays, such as Sacred Cows...and other Edibles published in 1988 and Racism 101 published in 1994. The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni was published in 1996, Love Poems in 1997, and Blues: For All the Changes in 1999.

Giovanni’s Harlem Renaissance, poetry and Black Aesthetics classes have held special events each year to illustrate some aspect of African-American life, including "hush-harbor choirs," which illustrate the fact that slaves had to hide to sing gospels, as well as fish fries, rent parties and chitllin’ struts to illustrate how people in the ‘20s raised money to get them through bad times.

"The students like doing these things, and I think they learn a lot," Giovanni said.

For more information about the costume ball, call 231-3787.

##00008##