A native of Charleston, Edmund Thornton Jenkins was the seventh son of Reverend Daniel Jenkins, who, born a slave, founded the Jenkins Orphanage on King Street; the Jenkins Orphanage Band accompanied every Broadway performance of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, the play on which Porgy and Bess was based. Edmund was the Ross Scholar at London’s Royal Academy of Music, winning awards in performance and composition before his premature death in Paris at age 32.
Jenkins’s last composition, Afram ou La Belle Swita, is an “African romance” that travels from Africa to the American South, encountering a prince and princess, a lounge lizard, banjos under the moonlight, and possum hunts; he intended this work to be performed by the likes of Florence Mills, the winsome “Queen of Happiness” from the Harlem Renaissance and a member of his coterie of friends.
Reconstructed in what is believed to be its first performance, Afram is a cabaret revue with songs, fox trots, and such evocations of Charleston as “Underneath the Palmettos and Pines.” The Spoleto Festival USA performance is directed by David Herskovits and features members of the Porgy and Bess cast, Afram transports you to the romance and whimsy of Jazz-age Paris, with a southern touch.
Spoleto Festival USA General Director Nigel Redden talks with SC Public Radio's Kate McKinney about Afram ou La Belle Swita and how this new production came about.