As part of Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Freshworks Residency, Natasha Thompson and I continued developing Lavender Terrace, a speculative, experimental, and iterative response to Marita Bonner’s play The Purple Flower. We experimented with hybridity and expanding our previous iterations of the work by blending the physical and the digital worlds through Zoom. Natasha and I were curious about staging a response to Bonner’s century-old fablistic play about a community of people of color deliberating on the best ways to achieve their spatial, political, and economic liberation from antagonistic “white devils.”  Our impossible creative prompt was, “What does a century of struggle look like?” 

My contributions to the project included artistic direction of two live duets and two pre-recorded solo dance movements with dancers A. J. Libert and Ty Humphries, in addition to creating original video art from archivally-sourced images and video of Black labor in the U.S. Credits: costume design by Damian Dominguez, sound design by Jasmine Battle, and cinematography by Audrey Medrano.