So you'll notice I don't have like super cool transitions.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm just going to move--
[WHISTLE]
--into the next thing.
[LAUGHTER]
So that is a picture from the performance of Non-Sequitur,
which was just staged in December,
and that is Helga Davis, who played the narrator.
I don't know how many of you have already read Non-Sequitur.
I'll read a little bit, but she basically
read the names of the characters,
because they're like, now they're like 100 of them,
and they're objects.
So it was really impossible to have
the characters wear like an outfit,
or you can tell who's who.
So she would say the name and then
the person would speak their line of dialogue.
But that particular play in the book
is about race and spectacle.
I was thinking about how my blackness figures
into other people's perceptions of me.
How do we cover the distance between the reality
of my existence, which is multiplicitous,
and the perception, which is often stereotypical.
How do I perform as a poet?
How do I perform blackness?
How do I perform womanhood?
How do all of us perform our own particular identities,
in terms of gender and race?
If that is even a thing?
Like it would be kind of a cool thing
if that just dissolved into a humanity, be kind of nice.
But for now--
[LAUGHTER]
--we're going to have to deal with the way things are.
And is it a performance?
Maybe it is.
How much of it is performance and how much of it
is a way of being?
So I was really interested in that with Non-Sequitur.
And I'm going to read you a couple of quotes
from Darby English.
He wrote this really cool book about art
called How to see a Work of Art in Total Darkness.
"We simply cannot see black artists' work until we throw it
into relief against the transformations it undergoes
and our inevitably social involvement with it.
Requires an alertness to the constructive, discursive,
and institutional, not innate, aspect
of a link between artists and idioms."
So in other words, it's not super separate from the world
that we live in, because we're all living in the world.
[COUGHING]
Although it is a consideration.