‘Anne Spencer Revisited’ coming soon

By Darrell Laurant

Published: January 7, 2009

It’s interesting the way photographer Susan Saandholland describes how the film “”Anne Spencer Revisited” took form last year inside the Lynchburg poet’s house on Pierce Street.

“The whole thing was like a coordinated dance,” she recalled recently. “We danced with each other in the most exquisite sort of way.”

She meant that metaphorically. In reality, though, the project started out as a literal dance, only to be altered by the cozy realities of Anne Spencer’s world.

“Just going inside her house, I could feel Anne Spencer’s presence,” said Keith Lee of the Dance Theater of Lynchburg. “I also realized we wouldn’t be doing any choreography in there.”

Not with all the treasured things (mostly books) that Spencer had collected during her life blocking stairwells and overflowing into traffic areas. Even though Anne Spencer died in 1975, the house was still quite full of her. So Lee’s project took a bypass into a film, something he had only dabbled in.

Saandholland, who is based in Roanoke, had never taken still photos for film; Sonia Langhorne, who portrays Spencer and reads her poetry, had never acted in one. Somehow, it all came together in a DVD (out this week) and accompanying book (out in December).

“Kate Grey, who is on our (the Dance Theater’s) board, had approached me about doing a dance about Anne Spencer and her poetry,” Lee said. “And I was like, ‘Who is Anne Spencer?’”

He knows, now. She was both a force of nature and a captive of it, a woman who remained anchored in Lynchburg much of her life, but who hosted dozens of intellectuals from the Harlem Renaissance movement at her home and sat with them as an equal. She grew poems as well as flowers in her garden, but published only a few during her lifetime.

“I didn’t have any audio recordings of her voice,” said Langhorne, whom Lee “discovered” when she taught his children at the St. John’s Episcopal Church preschool, “so I had to try and imagine how she would have sounded. I gave her a Southern accent, and then I found out later that she didn’t have one. Her diction was very precise.”

Nevertheless, the Brooklyn-born Langhorne carries the entire film on her slender shoulders. There are no other actors, and her only dialogue consists of reading poems in various settings around the Spencer house and garden.

“The more I learned about her, the more I saw how much alike we were,” Langhorne said of Spencer. “My birthday is Feb. 7, hers in Feb. 6. I’m a teacher, she was a teacher. She wrote poetry, I wrote poetry.”

Saandholland’s accompanying photographs are mostly of flowers, with a poem blooming on each facing page. There are more poems in the book than in the film. Beth Packert — a board member of the Anne Spencer Foundation who put the book together and wrote the background notes — hopes the physical beauty of the 48-page volume will lure in readers who may not have been acquainted with its subject.

“It’s a pretty book,” Packert said, “and the photographs are wonderful. That may draw people into the book, then into the poems, and finally into the notes for perspective. As part of our grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, we’re givinig a copy of both the book and the DVD to 50 schools in the area.”

Credit for the final work must also go to videographer Phil Spinner and Nina Salmon, a local expert on Spencer (and Packert’s fellow board member).

“The idea behind ‘Anne Spencer Revisited’ was that it would give new life to her,” Lee said, “and what a life she lived.”

The book and DVD will also be available later this month at local bookstores, the Anne Spencer House and the Dance Theater of Lynchburg.