For Black Trans Girls... by DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI DIGITAL PLAYBILL MARCH 31St, 2021 BLUEBARN | 32 | Season of the Unknown
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For Black Trans Girls... BY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI DIGITAL PLAYBILL MARCH 31st, 2021 BLUEBARN | 32 | Season of the Unknown eason 32 marks a profound shift in perspective. This year we give focus to Sbuilding on BLUEBARN’s transformative programming and services, seeding the fires that will light our way for years to come. A different kind of season awaits us. A different kind of membership awaits you… In these extraordinary times, we invite you to become caretakers of BLUEBARN’s mission. We invite you to provoke thought, emotion, action, and change in our community. Your BLUEBARN membership is a commitment, not to a certain number of productions or nights of theatre, but to the BLUEBARN’s essential work on and off the stage, our values, our art, and our artists. Incomparable theatre and incandescent storytelling remain at the core of our work. For these wild times, we have imagined adventurous new ways to bring the power of story back into all our lives. We have also dreamed up better ways to harness your BLUEBARN membership to “The future is in disorder. extend the reach of our art and sustain A door like this the lives of artists. has cracked open BLUEBARN is proud to announce a host five or six times since we got up of programs and programming that we on our hind legs. It hope will ignite and inspire you. We is the best possible must acknowledge as we do so the very time to be alive, when real uncertainty of the coming year. almost everything you Our season accepts disruptions and thought you knew was adaptations to shifting circumstances as wrong.” givens. — Tom Stoppard, Arcadia The mission stands. The work continues. Join us in lighting the fires that will guide us through this Season of the Unknown and into the future. With gratitude, Susan Clement-Toberer Producing Artistic Director — 2 — — 3 — TRUBLU MEMBERSHIP SEASON HAPPENINGS: Holiday Hootenanny | Music, song, Bonfire Series | Five Extraordinary dance, story. For the longest nights, Works of Theatre. Dozens of the warmest of fires… and joy to us Extraordinary Artists. all! | Dec 17th-20th The Shape of Things to Come. Marjorie Prime | The great pause ———————— began March 17th. Our set still stands R33 | Sarah Brown after ready on our stage. We’ll premiere as Shakespeare soon as it’s safe. Three actors. One monster. What Digital Access | Live-streamed would you sacrifice to overcome shows. Virtual Tours. Special events. tyranny? The best seats in the house. Your own. For Black Trans Girls… | Radical Hospitality | Arts access is Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi a human right. BLUEBARN will offer A choreopoem. A fantasia. Love and pay-what-you-wish attendance for justice for a new generation. those facing economic barriers. Escaped Alone | Caryl Churchill Artists Fund | BLUEBARN is the only One of the most revered living professional contemporary theatre in playwrights. A most deranged tea Omaha committed to a living wage party. for all its artists. Before After | Knapman & Price Out of the Blue | A new path. What if you had a second chance Education. Touring. On the road. to get it right the first time? A new Online. Only from the BLUEBARN musical. A Chorus Line | The music. The Buffalo Women | Beaufield Berry mirror. The magic. We’re cast. We’re Juneteenth. Newfound freedom. committed. The show will go on. This New lives. A Black cowgirl musical summer. comedy. Anti-Racist Ethos | BLUEBARN owns that systemic racism is real and must be fought against wherever and however it shows up–in our community, in our theatre, in ourselves. — 4 — LOVE, RITUAL AND THE HOLINESS IN REMEMBRANCE There was no journey towards womanhood for me Never a not knowing I have always been Goddess fallen into skin I have always been a psalm of womanhood A remembrance A Healing For Black Trans Girls... was revealed to me in pieces, almost like a work that was hidden behind a veil and only through my own journey towards it was I able to recognize the whole of it, realizing that it was indeed a mirror reflecting back onto who beheld it. Like much brilliant art, I can’t remember when I first saw or read Queen Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls..., because it feels as if it had always been. And in truth when I think about how the becoming of art is the revealing of it, it holds true. Rooted in Ritual, Black womanhood, Ancestor, and descendant, For Colored Girls revolutionized the ways in which non-BIPOC audiences experienced Theater. I believe that without it we would have never had many hip hop theater productions we enjoy today. For Colored Girls... is dripping in Blackness, and womanhood and it was the first time that I could recall hearing a theater piece in which Black women were centering themselves fully. It is no doubt that For Black Trans Girls... is a literary daughter of For Colored Girls... from the use of the form of the choreo poem to centering Black women being, saying, revealing, revelry and raging in their stories like Black women do. The work is unconcerned with the gaze of white people while understanding that white people will be partaking in a sort of witnessing of it. For Black Trans Girls... also links the oppressions faced by Black Trans women (and in truth all BIPOC) to colonization, white supremacy, and imperialism. By centering their own voices and perspectives, the Black Trans women, in the play, demand the audience to reckon with its hand in the struggles they face. The choeroem is fit for this type of work, because it does not allow a western audience to fall into a witnessing that feels too familiar. The choreopoem by its very nature is a subversion of some members of a western audience’s idea of how a play should be structured. A typical western form of storytelling in which we would witness one protagonist trying, failing, fighting and overcoming or not, centered on the white gaze often allows a white audience to center their own cathartic experience without every thinking about how their choices in their own lives, outside of the theater, lead to the harm, and sometimes death of Black trans women. In retrospect, it makes sense that I wrote a version of Of Bodies and History Lesson first. One about Black Trans women finding joy, and life in revelations and reveling in the agency and autonomy of themselves, also about healing, releasing and reclaiming. The other detailing a piece of history about the violence faced by BIPOC people at the hands of the state. This piece inviting the audience not to hide behind their illusions about the history of this country or a white savior narrative. Then, as time spun, there came poetic monologues of triumphant, of love, of community, of sisterhood, of pleasure, of sorrow, of anger, of defiance, of revenge, and demands for the world to remember who Black trans people are and have always been. For Black Trans Girls... celebrates the ancestral knowing that those who we call Trans people are in fact divine. That before conversations about gender affirmation surgeries in the 50s, trans people existed within countless Indigenous cultures around the world and often held titles of prominence and spiritual reverence and that the survival of humanity depends on the survival of who we call Trans people. I am reminded of Queen Ntozake’s words in For Colored Girls... where she says “I found God in myself and I loved Her fiercely.” That truth is at the heart of For Black Trans Girls.... Black trans women finding Goddesshood within themselves, recognizing the Goddnesshood in their sisters and loving themselves with such fearlessness and relentlessness, a fearless relentlessness whose being defies everything that has ever tried to take us away from ourselves. The Choreopoem, an ancestral form living here in the present, is a manifestation of a remembrance. There is power in the remembrance, remembrance in the ritual, and ritual in the love. — Dane Figueroa Edidi, Playwright — 6 — B O N F I R E SERIES For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss a Mother Fucker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough: A Choreo Poem BY Dane Figueroa Edidi DIRECTED BY Paige Hernandez March 31st, 2021 This performance runs approximately 90 minutes. There will be no intermission. — 7 — PLAY DEVELOPMENT For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Mothrfucker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough became it’s development journey as a book of poetry that could also act as a script for a play. In 2017 Theater Alliance produced the first reading of For Black Trans Girls... in D.C. directed by myself. The cast included. Didi/Narrator ............................................................................Dane Figueroa Peaches ............................................................................................ Edidi Venus Red Bone Woman ................................................................... Selenite Anita Unknown Woman ...........................................................B’Ellana Duquesne The script included many pieces from the original script and did not include the Sisterhood of Silence. The show ran about 2 hours. In 2018 Woolly Mammoth Theater Company produced the second reading of For Black Trans Girls.... in D.C. It was directed by Paige Hernandez and the cast included: Didi ....................................................................................Dane Figueroa Edidi Peaches .................................................................................................Dezi Bing Red Bone Woman .........................................................................Kita Updike Unknown Woman ......................................................................... Cece Sauzo Stage Directions/ Narrator ...................................................Venus Selenite The script was paired down a bit and included one additional monologue entitled What the Doctor Say. Of Bodies began to take shape into what it would eventually become in it’s next iteration. This is the first time Sisterhood of Silence is included in a reading of the entire show. In 2019 Woolly Mammoth Theater Company and Laverne Cox produced the third reading of For Black Trans Girls...