News Flash

New York Times News Service July 21, 2007 NEW YORK - Sekou Sundiata, a poet and performance artist whose work explored slavery, subjugation, and the tension between personal and national identity, especially as they inform the black experience in America, died Wednesday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Brooklyn. The cause was heart failure, said his producer, Ann Rosenthal. At his death, Mr. Sundiata was a professor in the writing program of Eugene Lang College of New School University. Mr. Sundiata's art, which defied easy classification, ranged from poems performed in the style of an oral epic to musical, dance and dramatic works infused with jazz, blues, funk, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In general, as he once said in a television interview, it entailed "the whole idea of text and noise, cadences and pauses." His work was performed widely throughout the United States and abroad, staged by distinguished organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Among Mr. Sundiata's most recent works was "the 51st (dream) state," an interlaced tapestry of poetry, music, dance, and videotaped interviews that explores what it means to be an American in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Mr. Sundiata was born Robert Franklin Feaster in Harlem on Aug. 22, 1948; he adopted the African name Sekou Sundiata in the late 1960s. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from City College of New York in 1972 and a master's degree in creative writing from the City University of New York in 1979. Mr. Sundiata, who performed with the folk rock artist Ani DiFranco as part of her "Rhythm and News" tour in 2001, released several CDs of music and poetry, including "The Blue Oneness of Dreams" and "longstoryshort." His work was also featured on television, on the HBO series "Def Poetry" and the PBS series "The Language of Life."