Comedic monologues for women of color
Consequently, the artistic vision of our production of the Monologues was-at least for me-directly influenced by my work and experience with Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls. Performing Shange’s work and work that was in her spirit allowed me to openly address the prolific nature of sexual assault, without alienating it from my personal experience or presenting it as an abstract political issue.Īfter seeing my performance, a former Barnard student director of The Vagina Monologues, Morgaine Gooding Silverwood, spoke to me about the possibility of being involved in the Monologues in a director’s capacity in the following year. However, I was incredibly grateful for the space that Shange’s work had made, both for me and for the other performers. To speak these words in front of an audience of fellow students, faculty, and strangers was both cathartic and profoundly difficult. These powerful stylistic choices affected me deeply and stirred my interest in participating in more campus theater focused on women’s varied experiences, such as The Vagina Monologues. Minimally choreographed, performed on the floor in front of the audience rather than on a stage, the performances at the “Performing Shange” event directed the focus of the audience first and foremost to the words and how the experiences they were conveying had impacted the individual who was speaking them. My performances were heavily influenced by my experience of having watched the FAMU performance of for colored girls. My reflection was part of a conceptual work by Ebonie Smith in which the performers were instructed to write and perform a monologue that allowed us to “leave a piece of ourselves on the stage,” and which started with the phrase, “The first time I knew I was…” Both “Latent Rapists” and my personal reflection addressed the issue of sexual assault and the extent to which it has become normalized in the lives of women of color.
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The pieces that I performed at the “Performing Shage” event, which was part of the larger conference, included a poem from for colored girls entitled “Latent Rapists,” as well as a personal reflection I wrote on being a survivor of sexual assault.
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My eagerness to be involved with this project stemmed most clearly from the performance I had seen years back at FAMU Shange’s words had a profound impact on how I thought of my own personal experiences as well as the experiences of other women of color who were prominent forces in my life. Hall, mentioned in my “Food, Ethnicity, and Globalization” class that interested students would have the opportunity to work on a creative piece inspired by Shange’s work, which would be performed at an event during the conference, I was quick to volunteer. Needless to say, when my professor, Kim F. The conference explored the tremendous impact of Shange’s work across a number of different art forms. In the spring of 2013, Barnard held the “Worlds of Shange” conference in an effort to forge a stronger relationship with the esteemed alumna as well as to honor her works. It was not until I began reading her work in classes and speaking about her to faculty members that I discovered she had spent her undergraduate years where I had chosen to spend mine. At the time, it was entirely unbeknownst to me that Shange was an alumna of Barnard. Shange’s wide breadth of work thus remained relatively unknown to me-that is, until I transferred to Barnard.
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I was unable to find much information that was unrelated to for colored girls, most likely because at the time, Tyler Perry’s cinematic rendition of the work had just begun playing in theaters. I found myself appreciating the specificity of these experiences and the way they articulated the characters’ identities as women of color without being reductive.Īfter the play, I remember going home and looking up who Ntozake Shange was on the Internet. What garnered my attention during the performance was that the play focused so intently on the scope and variance of experiences recounted by the women on stage. I remember being struck by the way the words that were spoken were paired with movement, and perhaps most vividly, the power of seeing a cast of women of color on stage. I was invited to attend a production of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf that the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) theater department was performing. The first time I heard the name Ntozake Shange, I was still in high school.
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Shange, nappy edges, (a cross country sojourn)