Blackness, Performance, Freedom
With Donald Glover at the helm of this episode, the audience is pulled into a parallel TV network that shocks, exposes, and tackles issues of the Black experience in America. Glover’s satire binds together a multitude of underlying messages. Current media repeatedly avoids gray areas. The binary of good and evil is something to cling…
The Fits centers around Toni, a child on the verge of becoming a teenage girl. Throughout the film, it is clear that Toni is different; stoic and awkward, she does not fit in with the dance crew. This is only exaggerated by the arrival of a mysterious ailments that is causing the girls to have…
A few weeks ago, we worked in small groups to imagine how we would might stage a performance depicted in Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. In my group, we looked at the performance titled “Blackout” which starts on page 102. It is unclear when the performance ends, but we assumed that it ends on the chapter…
Two of my journals have looked at how fashion impacts the message of music videos such as Beyoncé’s “Formation” and Childish Gambino’s “This is America”; for this post, I want to look at the clothing – or lack of clothing – in Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” music video; in light of reading “Sound Gestures” by…
The film Guava Island embellishes and create new meaning for Childish Gambino’s music. In its essence, Guava Island is a musical. It was intentional to not have Glover’s music as a soundtrack, but rather embedded into the text. We hear full performances from Glover as Deni. They include background dancers and surrealist effects just like…
In one of my journal assignments, I performed a healing ritual from Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo titled “Suitors with the Moon’s Blessing” and discovered the importance of learning about the world through many types of mediums. For this post, I want to look at a different healing ritual found on page 25; I…
For my post, I have decided to tackle prompt 3: does the difference in setting affect how we understand the dancing and lyrical performances in the music video “This is America” versus Guava Island? I want to think through this question because I find it intriguing that the exact same song and dancing can be…