She Who Is: The Adrienne Kennedy Fugues

2018

Visually inspired by Classical Hollywood imagery that floods the works of American playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Throughout her body of work protagonists are highly educated, acculturated African American academics find themselves teetering on the edge of the “metaphysical dilemma” that is in the margins where those living both inside and outside of the academy are squeezed. Kennedy interrupts the “system” of the well-made play with long poetic, cinematically described stage directions.

I posit that these stage directions are the flesh made word. Often these directions are given short shrift in theatrical performance. By extracting them and following them to the letter, I am making space to contemplate relationship between the life lived in the Black female body and the demands of the systems of confinement and exclusion in dominant culture.