Inspired by Keith Lee’s two-decades of work in dance, film, and theater paying homage to Lynchburg’s legendary poet Anne Spencer, this new work is a collaboration across cities and humanities disciplines. This new version combines multi-disciplinary works to display portraits of Anne Spencer and her husband Edward Alexander Spencer, set against the backdrop of their home on Pierce Street in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Choreography: Keith Lee (Premiere)
Inspired by his full-length play Annie’s Pencil (2010), a Dance Theatre of Lynchburg production with script by Shaun Spencer-Hester
Music: "Adoration" by Florence Price, arr. by Thomas Getty & Peter Leonard
Violin: Virgil Moore
Piano: Thomas Getty
Multimedia Concept: Curated by Keith Lee with Emily Hartka
Film: Anne Spencer Revisited (2008) by Keith Lee with
videography by Phil Spinner and images by Susan Saandholland
Poetry: Anne Spencer
Actress: Sonia Langhorne
Historical Images & Pierce Street Gateway Projections: Brianna Copeland
Some Historic Pierce Street Residents Images provided by Blackwell Press
Humanities Scholar & Project Consultant: Dr. Nina Salmon
Costumes: Ty Cooper Grace
Dancers:
Simone Ayres as Anne Spencer
Luigie Barrera as Edward Spencer
Florence Price (1887–1953) was a groundbreaking American composer, pianist, and organist and the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, when the Chicago Symphony premiered her "Symphony in E Minor" in 1933. Her music blends Romantic tradition with spirituals and African American musical influences, creating a voice that is both lyrical and deeply expressive. "Adoration," originally written for organ and heard here in a violin arrangement, is one of her most beloved short works—a serene, intimate meditation that reflects the grace and emotional depth at the heart of her musical language.
Anne Spencer (1882–1975) was a poet, educator, and civil rights activist whose Lynchburg home became a vital hub for Black intellectual life in the Jim Crow South. The first Virginian and one of the first African American women included in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, Spencer published only a few dozen poems in her lifetime—many exploring themes of beauty, resistance, and liberation. Her home on Pierce Street, now a museum and cultural gateway, hosted luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and her dear friend Langston Hughes. Spencer's lush garden and private writing retreat—known as Edankraal—fueled a poetic voice rooted in nature and defiance. Her legacy lives on through her verse and her vision, which continues to inspire new generations of artists, scholars, and community builders across Virginia and beyond.
Life-long, poor Browning never knew Virginia,
Or he’d not grieved in Florence for April sallies
Back to English gardens after Euclid’s linear:
Clipt yews, Pomander Walks, and pleachéd alleys;
Primroses, prim indeed, in quite ordered hedges,
Waterways, soberly, sedately enchanneled,
No thin riotous blade even among the sedges,
All the wild country-side tamely impaneled …
Dead, now, dear Browning, lives on in heaven,—
(Heaven’s Virginia when the year’s at its Spring)
He’s haunting the byways of the wine-aired leaven
And throating the notes of the wildings on wing;
Here canopied reaches of dogwood and hazel,
Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,
Fleet clapping rills by lush fern and basil,
Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines …
Think you he meets in this tender green sweetness
Shade that was Elizabeth … immortal completeness!
From Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers,1927), edited by Countee Cullen.
Turn an earth clod
Peel a shaley rock
In fondness molest a curly worm
Whose familiar is everywhere
Kneel
And the curly worm sentient now
Will light the word that tells the poet what a poem is
The Place: 1313 Pierce Street & the Pierce Street Gateway
Anne Spencer’s house and garden at 1313 Pierce Street is both a domestic space and an artistic, civic one: a home built by Edward, and a garden Anne cultivated as a sanctuary for reading, writing, and gathering. Pierce Street is commemorated through the Pierce Street Renaissance Gateway initiative and interpretive plaques honoring key figures connected to the neighborhood’s history.
From CB’s cultural partner Pierce Street Gateway:
It is the very ordinariness of the street as a whole that makes the 1300 and 1400 blocks of Pierce … remarkable. Buried in old downtown like a gold nugget encased in a chunk of rock, they offer nothing less than magic.
In recent years, Pierce Street has finally begun to receive its due. Eight historic markers now line its sidewalks, a density of homage unparalleled in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Five of those plaques are featured in the performance today, honoring individuals who contributed to the street’s mystique—poet Anne Spencer, her son Chauncey (one of the original the Tuskegee Airmen), tennis coach and physician Dr. Robert “Whirlwind” Walter Johnson, innovative educator and local politician C. W. Seay, and Frank Trigg, born into slavery but later the head of three colleges.
Perhaps the best way to emphasize that is simply to list some of the luminaries who have set foot there:
Iconic black writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. James Weldon Johnson, an early leader of the NAACP. U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Poet Langston Hughes. Singers Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. Agricultural pioneer George Washington Carver. Longtime congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who spent the first night of his honeymoon there. World-class tennis players Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson. Sen. Carter Glass, co-founder of the Federal Reserve System. Influential journalist H. L. Mencken. Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Lionel Hampton. Duke Ellington. Maya Angelou. And, not least, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
All part of the rich life story of an out-of-the-way street in an out-of-the-way city.