Black enough

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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Alabama Libraries
Abstract

It is April. My thesis is due in less than a week, and I am sitting with my director, Eric Marable, Jr., and Fox News 6 anchor, Kelsey Davis, in the Fox 6 newsroom. As we sit there, three Black folks discussing a show by and for Black people, on local television, live, I can’t stop smiling. The next day, watching the clip online, I start crying. As a kid growing up in Kansas, I had never seen that before on the local news: Blackness, and nothing else. As a show, Black Enough aims to avoid definitions. I wanted to create something that couldn’t really be pinned down as one thing doing one thing. But, if I could capture the essence of Black Enough in a moment, it would the feeling of watching people who looked like me on TV, Flourishing. The message of my thesis, my one man show, Black Enough, is simple: Black people, you are enough. But getting to that message was not easy. This thesis is a culmination of years of study and input from a countless number of individuals, especially my creative team. As stated in the very first scene of the show, the main question motivating this thesis is how can we use performance to reimagine Blackness as the Flourish, or infinite possibility. The thesis will not seek to answer the question, but instead attempt to find its own way to perform Blackness as the Flourish.

Description
Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Keywords
African American studies, Performing arts, Black studies
Citation