WEBVTT

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So you'll notice I don't have
like super cool transitions.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I'm just going to move--

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[WHISTLE]

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--into the next thing.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So that is a picture from the
performance of Non-Sequitur,

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which was just
staged in December,

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and that is Helga Davis,
who played the narrator.

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I don't know how many of you
have already read Non-Sequitur.

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I'll read a little
bit, but she basically

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read the names of
the characters,

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because they're like, now
they're like 100 of them,

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and they're objects.

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So it was really
impossible to have

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the characters wear
like an outfit,

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or you can tell who's who.

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So she would say
the name and then

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the person would speak
their line of dialogue.

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But that particular
play in the book

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is about race and spectacle.

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I was thinking about
how my blackness figures

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into other people's
perceptions of me.

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How do we cover the
distance between the reality

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of my existence, which
is multiplicitous,

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and the perception, which
is often stereotypical.

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How do I perform as a poet?

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How do I perform blackness?

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How do I perform womanhood?

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How do all of us perform our
own particular identities,

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in terms of gender and race?

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If that is even a thing?

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Like it would be
kind of a cool thing

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if that just dissolved into
a humanity, be kind of nice.

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But for now--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--we're going to have to
deal with the way things are.

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And is it a performance?

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Maybe it is.

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How much of it is performance
and how much of it

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is a way of being?

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So I was really interested
in that with Non-Sequitur.

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And I'm going to read
you a couple of quotes

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from Darby English.

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He wrote this really
cool book about art

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called How to see a Work
of Art in Total Darkness.

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"We simply cannot see black
artists' work until we throw it

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into relief against the
transformations it undergoes

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and our inevitably social
involvement with it.

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Requires an alertness to the
constructive, discursive,

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and institutional,
not innate, aspect

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of a link between
artists and idioms."

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So in other words, it's not
super separate from the world

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that we live in, because
we're all living in the world.

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[COUGHING]

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Although it is a consideration.

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