Statement of Creative Research

I came to University of California, Davis as an Associate Professor in 2016. I am a multi-disciplinary theatre-based artist, who, during the time of this review period, has created or collaborated on fifteen works in the areas of performance, theatre, and film. Additionally, I founded (in collaboration with Oona Hatton) Davis Repertory Theatre Company. I have been awarded six grants, two commissions (Montalvo Arts Center, CA and May Gallery, MI) and four residencies (Headlands Center for the Arts, CA; Bundanon, Australia), and I have written three publications. Finally, I have been recognized with two national awards: American College Theatre Festival for Directing and MICHA Michael Chekhov Artist Scholar. 

My work focuses on examining intersectionality as it relates to the systems of science and nature as they mirror the impact of systemic structural racism, discrimination, unconscious bias, authorship, identity, and representation. Informed by sonic, somatic, and visual practices, I use an economy of materials, including my own flesh, dirt and plastic, and extreme costuming: these humble, mutable, and strong enough to stand up to my rigorous cross-disciplinary, scholarly and creative research/process-oriented work. My goal is to make seen and heard the underheard stories of African American people and women specifically. 

This narrative contextualizes my work within historical and global contemporary performance and theatre making practices. It will reveal my artistic and scholarly DNA which goes all the way back to earlier multi-disciplinary African American artists and activists, such as W.E.B Du Bois who was a playwright (The Star of Ethiopia), an installation artist (American Negro exhibition 1900), a sociologist (The Souls of Black Folk), and a college professor. As such, my creative expression, like theirs, cannot be siloed by the traditions of Western European cultural and academic traditions. I skillfully, purposefully, and necessarily cross creative boundaries to create the desired work. Additionally, this document will show how my invented theatre practices are being referenced as templates for creating new work that is relevant now and are becoming the foundation of the theatre of the future.

Collaboration and research open the way for new inventions and approaches to making work. Within the review period, I have distinguished myself as an “inventor” of new artistic forms. My methods of research are time and labor intensive. Research can range from collaborating with South African theatre makers in exploring African puppetry traditions to learning indigenous Aboriginal Australian foraging arts.  All my collaborators leave marks on me and challenge me to creatively respond in ways that are personal and political, revelatory and purposeful, and, in some cases, healing.

Antigone was intended to be performed live on stage. By March 2020, the virus COVID-19 had closed the nation, and I had to completely reconsider how I would accomplish my creative goals without putting a play on a physical stage. I am known for performing in alternate spaces and inventing techniques to tell stories infused with my creative heritage and artistic lineage, but I had never transformed a play intended for live performance to performance on the internet. I considered, “my theatrical space is cyberspace,” and then pondered how to then create work specifically for that venue. AntigoneNOW is also one for first internet performances to incorporate the challenges of COVID-19 isolation into the performed work.

With only two weeks before rehearsals were planned to begin and eight weeks before the performance would be presented to the public, there was no template for rehearsal, performance, or exhibition.

Inspired by the isolation, social and physical distancing that is part of living under a pandemic, I abandoned character-specific dialogue that is generally heard in theatre and which creates unified sound communities and tidy character arcs. I brought syncopation and percussive elements from Jazz and Hip Hop and gave rise to polyphonic characterization that is reminiscent of how sound is heard on the internet. I innovated a rehearsal methodology that while still text based focussed on actors personal ‘physical dramaturgy’. This rehearsal practice completely replaced traditional ‘scene study’ in the rehearsal process.  

I also developed collaboration techniques to unify the entire team who worked in isolation from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Singapore. AntigoneNOW was premiered worldwide for 24 hours online. Since the original screening the work has shown at the Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival and The Wirtz Center at Northwestern University. So far it has been viewed by was viewed by 1,644 people in 34 countries

The original practices that I have invented will be used as templates for other theatre makers who are seeking to respond to these unprecedented times with Theatre for the Internet as a Theatrical Space. A Facebook Live event to discuss the performance methodologies was enthusiastically attended. I have been invited to present my research on two separate panels at the highly regarded Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2020 conference plenary session titled Humanizing the Digital: Pedagogy. 

I have been invited to share my expertise as a collaborator on The Trojan Women project. This project, developed by Michael Morgan, uses the play The Trojan Women to address the issues of young women in the juvenile criminal justice system. Starting from Euripides' play The Trojan Women, I will work with a cohort of incarcerated female youth, not to duplicate the story but to reconstitute the play's themes that privilege the participants' perspectives in the retelling.

When I was invited to direct the play The Bluest Eye, adapted for the stage by Lydia Diamond from Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name, I responded with a quick and resolute “no.” Although Toni Morrison’s themes (the intersection of land to race, class, gender, and poverty and history) overlap, broadly speaking, with my creative interests, I also knew that this text had problems that I thought were insurmountable. Reviews frequently lamented that the play is largely a narrative re-telling of a story. Curious, I returned to the novel and found that Diamond used “narration” as a tactic to turn the novel into a play. If this was the play’s flaw, I wondered how I could turn passive narration into active performance. Returning to the novel with a beginner’s mind, which is foundational to the creative process, I discovered that in the novel the past and present exist side by side. I recognized that is Toni Morrison’s tactic for telling the untellable story. This is also an articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness theory. My “no” became not only a yes, but a must.  I set out to invent a way to make Toni Morrison’s literary tactic the basis for the theatrical event that would launch The Bluest Eye.

I turned to what I had learned when touring South Africa performing my solo play Confluence. I learned that puppetry is central to African dramatic performance. I recalled hearing about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and learning that the stories of apartheid had such a powerful impact that people would pass out when they tried to articulate their experience, so puppets were brought in to carry some of the weight of these stories.  The connection between the Apartheid narratives and Morrison’s novel, ranked by the American Library Society as the second most banned book, is this: both are “too awful to tell” but still must be spoken.  

 As a result of this production, MICHA Michael Chekhov Association awarded me the Artist Scholar Award.  While in residence at their international festival, I created directed a new work using the methodologies that I had invented for The Bluest Eye.  By invitation I will be a featured presenter at the highly regarded Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2020. I will present this methodology to the "Driving New Work; Innovative Experiments in Creating Original Work” panel. 

This first of its kind production went on to win four Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival regional and national awards, for directing, ensemble performance, and a special award for puppetry. This is the first national theatre award that the University of California, Davis has ever received. 

While I am a busy theatre and performance maker, I am still frequently called on to work as an actor on projects that are not my own. I am a member of both Actors Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA (film actor’s union). 

I have appeared in two feature films. The 2019 horror film, Blood Bound, is a critical favorite and has a strong fan following. It was released in cinemas and now is available on streaming platforms as it retains its popularity. In 2017-18, I starred in the film Ten-Cent Daisy. Set in the Caribbean, this film is a modern take on little known Caribbean mermaid myths. This is a first of its kind in the “mermaid” genre. In this narrative, a family of multi-generational mermaids struggle with grief and climate change. The film is now in its final stages of post-production. I look forward to a 2022 cinema release. This film represents the second of what I hope will be several films funded by Caribbean people, by, about, and starring Caribbean (diasporic or native) actors. I also starred in the multiple award-winning Bahamian romantic drama Children of God. While it is outside of the review period, it is important to know how that this film started the “film for social change movement” in the Caribbean. My practice, whether I am the lead artist or I am hired as an actor, is intended to bring underheard voices and unseen stories forward. 

I have already worked at Sacramento’s most highly acclaimed theatre, B-Street, which has hired me three times in the past five years. My performance as Elizabeth in The Christians (2016) played to sold out houses for nearly the entire run and won audience and critical praise. I was happy to return to participate as an actor for the 2018 National Showcase of New Plays. 

Solo performance is integral to my creative practice. It is within solo practice that questions of authorship, spatial rights, and intimacy can be meditated upon. 

This Land is... was commissioned by the Detroit’s Elaine May Gallery. This site-specific solo performance explores the intersection of place and authorship. Performed in the collapsing and simultaneously gentrifying urban center of Detroit and performed to a sonic landscape sourced from the great poet, essayist and Detroit native, Robert Hayden’s 1962 reading about “his” Detroit of the 1940’s, I moved through the score while speaking the text of Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” written in the 1940’s about the slave trade route from the point of view of “the slavers.” I used extreme costuming to physically envelope the viewing participant into the performance in order to immerse the entire group in the past so that they could recognize its ghostly imprint on the present and consider its impact on the future.

The entire live performance of Where Does the Blue Sky Start/Ghosting/Witness This was inspired by my quest to perform The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. The combined pieces – the performance and the film generated from the performance – question personal and technical systems that impact and result in surveillance, myth-making, subjectivity, objectivity, and authorship.

In conversation with James Baldwin's question “how much time?” I am exploring my own questions around the internet/digital space and the impact on embodiment in The Martian. This piece combines image and text, both actual and digital landscapes, to challenge time and space as it relates to emotional engagement and to personal and collective narrative/authorship.

Film projects are an important part of my creative work. I conceived of the following film projects, and created and directed them, in collaboration with the artists mentioned in the paragraphs below. 

CITE utilizes film editing techniques that articulate my uneasy relationship to the natural world. Six hundred still images of my dancing Black feet transcend time, melding the past with both the present and the future and positioning historic and present fear alongside the pervasive jubilation of Black folks. Focusing on the natural world and the Black body – the feet, in particular – I conjure, with the photographs and editing, a kaleidoscopic musing on movement and a body’s various physical states of being: Breathing. Dancing. Loitering. Longing. Laughing. I am pointing the viewer towards a perception of the human form and how that perception shifts depending on the introduction of rhythmic motion and the body’s physical presence in nature.

CITE features images, all photographed outdoors by Laura Sanders, that hearken back to the canon of historical paintings by classical artists in which horizons are shown with the intent to celebrate dominance and ownership of bodies and land. When the Black body is introduced within this context, as with these images of brown feet upon the brown ground, that dialogue is artfully disrupted and upended.

In the film Surveillance Like a Hollywood Movie/Unburning, I ask the viewer to think across two films (one overlaying the other) in a consideration of authorship and performance through the lens of systems of subjugation and surveillance. The film which undergirds this project was created from “surveillance” footage taken with personal digital devices and submitted by viewers of my durational (five hour) performance at Montalvo Arts Center. The submitted footage was reassembled as a completed film and renamed Surveillance Like a Hollywood Movie. My performance and the film generated question personal and technical systems that impact and result in surveillance, myth-making, subjectivity, objectivity, and authorship. 

Overlaying my original work are images created by Abram Stern from Unburning. These are a series of operational images that visually separate overlays from FBI aerial surveillance video documentation of the Baltimore Uprising in 2005, which followed the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. The inclusion of this footage, together with the film’s ambiguity, asks open-ended questions about the role of digital media in reproducing a criminalizing and deeply racialized gaze. It calls into question the impact on humanity when ghostly traces of injustice remain even when video evidence is removed, redacted, or even forgotten. The overlays represent the reality that these images, "burned into" the video by the FBI's infrared sensors, have also been burned into the psyche of the viewing participant and society at large. 

As mentioned above, this film, commissioned by Montalvo Center for the Arts, was created from footage submitted by audience members who saw my durational performance (5 hours), Where Does the Blue Sky Start/Ghosting/Witness This. The entire live performance was inspired by my quest to research through performance, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. Like the live performance and the collaborative work mentioned above, the film questions personal and technical systems that impact and result in surveillance, myth-making, subjectivity, objectivity, and authorship. 

Through filmed performances of stage directions written by Adrienne Kennedy I interrogated and interrupted the systems of the European well-made. Stylistically these short films/screen adaptations, filmed and directed by Julie Wyman, acknowledge Kennedy’s love of film as expressed in her play The Movie Star has to Star in Black and White. These films focus on her socially isolated African American female protagonists who are, as New Yorker critic Hilton Als says, “Eternally torn between their real, external black selves … and the world of their imagined selves—alternate versions of a divided mind.” 

Thinking about the theatrical space as place, this collection of short films, She Who Is: The Adrienne Kennedy Fugues, is a detailed exploration of the physical actions her African American protagonists perform. The films are a meditation on the dichotomy African American people (particularly women) often experience in spaces dominated by the western imagination.