Race & Performance in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Nikki A. Greene and Nkenna Akunna Ibeakanma

[music]

You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Nkenna Akunna Ibeakanma

I'm Nkenna Akunna Ibeakanma, an MFA candidate in playwriting and the Department of Theatre [Arts] and Performance Studies. I'm speaking with Associate Professor of Art History and Visiting Scholar at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Professor Nikki Greene, about the recent discussion panel on “Race and Performance in America.” Thank you for joining me, Professor Greene.

Nikki A. Greene

Thank you for having me.

NBI

I was thinking a lot about how so much of real life can feel like practice when you come to the stage. I want to ask about performance, and power, and agency, particularly from the space of Black femme performers who are experiencing a kind of performance every day. How can performance be a space of agency?

NG:

Performance as a space of agency? I love the question because it takes some time to even understand that agency exists. I think about how early Black girls are told to behave in public; how we’re told how to sit, wear a dress, keep your legs closed, don't talk too loudly, don't talk over grown folks. There are so many do's and don'ts. I fell victim to it as well with my daughter. We learn very early that there is a way to behave at home versus the public. If you're out, you're told to act like you have some home training. I'm always so proud when my kids come back and a parent remarks, “oh they were so polite.” Yes! Home training. So, we understand very early on we're doing a performance for our parents, depending on what we want from them. But it takes a while before we understand that. Going outside of some of those rules of comportment, it's usually about respectability but there's something else that's involved.

Sometimes it’s safety. I grew up in a city. I’m from Newark, New Jersey, I'm very proud to say that. But I grew up in a city where you really had to be aware of your surroundings — whether someone's following you, whether there was a stray dog, what you know — you have a way that you understand performance as an element of safety.

You also understand that there's an element of performance in currying favors. Clearly I love school, I have not left it. So, how do you perform to please a teacher, how do you perform to fit in with your peers? That is universal, regardless of race, but for Black girls in particular, we are taught that if we don't follow those rules, there are sometimes real consequences, be it a danger, be it a kind of discrimination from a teacher, for example, or from a doctor who doesn't believe your pain. You get to learn quickly, how much your voice counts, or how little it counts.

Now, as a middle aged academic looking back, I remember how often I performed in class to sound like an art historian or someone who knew what she was talking about. That included how I wore my hair, which was straightened; it included how I dressed, how I spoke, whether I spoke as if I was from Newark, New Jersey, or whether I was being trained in the Academy.

It's a long way of getting at how I see the role of artist and what they have to offer us. It is an ability, then, to take all of those rules, all of these expectations, lay them bare either on a stage, or canvas, in a photograph, or in a dance, allowing us to see what we may already know, and what we have left to discover. And so, if someone writes on a page what I know I've been thinking all my life, and I just didn't even have an awareness of it, but now that I've seen it written out now that I've listened to this person recite a poem, I can find a level of agency within myself that I did not know existed because an artist was brave enough to do some of that work for me in a different form, in a way that I may not have been able to access if I didn't see it performed on stage. I may not have been able to access it if I didn't hear it in a song. So that's how I see the power of performance opening up spaces of agency. In a way that only art can do that, in my opinion.

NBI

Absolutely. Yeah, that's really profound. I'm thinking a lot about how the work reads you. And so, then how it will commune or speak to some of your own lived experiences, some of the things that are hard to name but it's so important to recognize that you can be seen.

NBI

I guess I'm coming from a lens, particularly in the theater where there's this court representation and authentic voices and buzzwords that, at the end of the day, there is still the idea that a producer decides what voice is being produced. And sometimes it can feel like if you write a show a certain way, or if you portray a story a particular way that might have more success because it might be considered representational to who is part of that question. But it does feel like something that performance makers or artists have to consider as they make a piece — is this going to harm someone because someone reads this as a harmful representation?

NG

It's clearly going to be based on systemic reinventions. And we've been seeing some of that transpire in the last couple of decades, where there are people who are mounting plays or having exhibitions that one could not have imagined twenty years ago, like not possible. So what makes it possible for certain artists to break through? I think, at times, it has to do with, a lot of times, the leaning into the authorial voice, allowing that sense of leaning into that space of agency.

NG

The question is how do I do that, when do I do that? Can I do it next week because I’ve got rent to pay? You know, there are some real factors in what success looks like while you're trying to provide this authentic Black voice. And I think for each artist, they are going to have to determine what success looks like for themselves.

I think about when I decided as an undergrad in the late ‘90s, “I want to be an art historian,” with no real examples besides these art history professors that I was meeting, none of whom were Black at my institution, but reading from women — Black women, like Kellie Jones and Samella Lewis, may she rest in peace, she just passed away recently — so many now that I can't remember. But it used to be just a handful that you could count one hand or a couple of hands. And watching them do something that hadn't been done, assuring me that there will be a space for me in 10, 15, 20 years. And then I enter that space. What happens is, the rate of return can be very slow. But there's something in particular with Black women, that we understand we lift as we climb, traditionally. Not everyone's on that same journey. But, if we have that sense of — you know the playwrights who you’ve looked up to you've read for years — you know that you can be in that same space, that same sphere, their voice speaks to you in a way that you're able to keep going.

NG

The fact that these scholars — I used to read their works in the ‘90s — I can now call mentors and friends and interact with as a grown woman, it's remarkable to me. And so, my responsibility, then, is to say to my students — we don't have a graduate center, I only have undergraduates — but to tell them that, you, as you are, whether you identify — I teach at a predominantly women's college — whether you identify as a woman, or not, that you have the power of your own voice and I'm here to make sure that I amplify that voice. So, I'm watching in the last five years, the number of undergraduate students that I've been able to see in a classroom, recognize them, call them to me, come to my office, let's talk, here's the show. We do this for those of us who are interested in mentoring and interested in seeing, not working to make sure that I get all of the credit for something. What I want, as a legacy — yeah, I would like my books to be part of it, right, that's a voice that's mine — but my legacy is that I helped, this person, that person, by name, I know who they are, how I helped them, seeing them grow, keeping and doing whatever I can to get them to shine, because people did that for me to allow me the scholar life, the kind of personal life, to be able to live as someone invested in the arts. That's the dream for me. I’m living, even though it's hard as hell. But what I know is that I am living my truth. I authentically love art. I love it and I convey that to my students. I have such passion for it. If I had the capacity to write about everything that moves me I would. I don't, but I would. It's in my head, it's in my heart.

And so, we're not going to get anywhere just performing or artists just having to perform because that's going to get them the most success. I pray and I feel like the people that I value and that I respect are those who have an authentic Black voice and work within these racist, misogynist awful systems and overturn it. They make it successful, despite that and usually it's because they have a chorus, a choir. The vision that comes to my mind is just the artist being lifted up with these hands Black hands that have carried them to this next space that maybe other people can't see, but we know it's there.

NBI

One hundred percent.

NG

Yeah.

NBI

Okay, we’ve already gone over time. I just want to ask you what excites you about performance right now?

NG

What excites me? I think this idea that there are more spaces interested in — when I say spaces, art institutions — who are opening up their galleries for performance and being able to witness change in real time. I belive that especially Black femme artists have something great, there's something really unsurmountable about the presence that Black femme artists have at this moment, and the more that institutions recognize that, the better off we all will be. And I'm here for the ride, I'm here for watching the glow up on stages, dance floors, art galleries, wherever it may be. I think this is, this is the time.

NBI

I could speak to you for so much longer, but we have to end.

NG

Yes! More conversations offline to come.

NBI

Many more. Thank you so much, Professor Greene.

NG

Thank you.

[music]

Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu