A man dressed in simple slacks and a button-down work shirt strides across the stage as a large screen flashes images and words behind him.

A spotlight follows the man as he walks while colored lights blink and spin all around. Soft jazz music is can be heard under the cadence of the man’s voice, reciting an excerpt from “The Knife” by Richard Selzer describing the magnificence of surgery. The man stops abruptly mid-sentence and the music ceases. “Beauty my ass,” the man says and laughs.

Sekou Sundiata, a dynamic and versatile artist, combines poetry, music, comedy, picture, and video to tell a story inspired by a five-year period of his life in which he battled a life-threatening illness, kidney failure, an organ transplant, and a near fatal car crash. “Blessing the Boats” is a performance based on a personal account about Sundiata’s fight against life-threatening health issues, but focuses on lessons of friendship, life, love, and death.

Rather than stand on stage and just read poetry, Sundiata uses a variety of mediums to spice up his performance. Instead of reciting his monologue while standing in one place, Sundiata walks around the stage while speaking. Tinted lights spin and flicker around him, pulsing to the beat of his speech. To help clarify the message of his show, a large screen projects pictures and phrases behind him while music ranging from blues, funk, and jazz to Afro-Caribbean percussion plays along with his performance.

“Blessing the Boats” is divided into sections that act almost like chapters in a novel, synthesizing different vignettes and weaving them together to create a story. In one section, titled “The part that hurts,” Sundiata opened in a mock Narcotics Anonymous meeting to tell of how he overcame his heroin addiction that eventually led to his kidney failure. It is in the section titled “The first boats,” that Sundiata explains why he called his performance “Blessing the Boats.” While at the hospital getting his blood cleaned, Sundiata was given the opportunity to meet other people in his same situation that were what he said were the first boats he’d met to be blessed.

At times in the performance the theatre was so filled with deafening laughter that it was as if it were a stand-up comedy performance rather than the story of battling kidney failure. Sundiata’s cynical and sarcastically truthful remarks on his own life and story caused the audience to laugh appreciatively as if to say, “Been there, done that, and boy, can I can sympathize with you.” Sundiata’s heartwarming story of survival contained underlying morals of life and love while using humor as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. While Sundiata’s humorous approach was entertaining, the performance began to drag on after an hour or so.

Sundiata will be in residence on the Stanford campus and active in the local community for the 2005 winter quarter. On February 14, Sundiata gave an informative lecture at the Mountain View Community School of Music and Arts where he blended his performance with audience participation and discussion.