Focused on the author’s work as a womanist playwright, director, and acting professor, this chapter reveals the personal, political, and performative implications of her most recent play, What the Heart Remembers: the Women and Children of Darfur, a choreo-poem for voice, dance, and percussion. In this chapter, she writes about the conceptual process of the “choreo-poem” and her journey toward its production. As an artistic-activist educator, she utilizes the play’s thematic focus as her personal response to the gender politics of genocide and ongoing civil war between North and South Sudan, in Africa. She not only reflects upon her position as a black/woman of color, she also addresses the politics of race and gender border-crossing involved in the play’s production related to her collaboration with her colleague (a white female dance professor and choreographer for the play). In 2012, she and her colleague premiered What the Heart Remembers in Scotland at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival.
Introduction: Making Race and Gender Politics on Twitter
