Artist’s Statement –

I am an artist who makes experiences. The contemporary nomenclature is theatre artist, but what I say is that what theatre arts do is shape an experience with three distinct materials – Persons – Space – Time. One of the great things about working in this medium is that the elements for construction are beyond definition, or are in constant reappraisal.
When one gets past the inadequacy as to the definition of the tools of construction for theatre artists, the next question is; what constitutes a valid experience? I am an African-American director and writer whose muses cause me to challenge my audience by the experience I help shape with my collaborators. The notion of challenging an audience is not done merely to be a contrarian, or for some notion of historical reciprocity; it is done for a few reasons, but there is one salient one. My African-American moral ethos compels me to challenge the notion of many of the so-called solutions or palliatives that we embrace. As James Baldwin said so eloquently, “the function of art is to unearth the questions that the answers have hidden.”
This is often counterintuitive to most American theatrical experience construction. Much of the contemporary American theatre is done to affirm a positionality of an individual or group. The audience comes to the theatre to view answers or truths or facts. My work lets audiences view questions or processes, or the lies that Pablo Picasso claimed helped us realize the truth. The knowledge that this artifice (art) can force one to confront something that will not ascend the art marker, but the intelligence of the audience to build through the false to something pointing toward truth rests in the artist ultimately having more faith in the audience than in himself. In this society with fixed, safe, instant solutions, the notions that I try to help shape challenge the viewer to view persons anew, in a time landscape that has been repositioned in a space that might morph before their eyes. It does not let the audience retreat to a simplistic narrative of what the play was about.
Even when I am making a so-called conventional theatrical experience, I want the audience to rethink what they know. An example might be, when I directed the WIZ. Before the first song (The Feeling We Once Had,) I had Aunt Em call Dorothy out to help with the laundry. I had the laundry placed on a Sankofa Tree, and it was two separate large sheets. As Aunt Em is singing this lovely ballad, she and Dorothy go to the tree and remove the first sheet, which has the diagram of the Slave Ship – Brookes. The juxtaposition of this lovely ballad and this horrific image was palpable in the audience. We all know that this is a musical, and artifice, but what I want is to bring many questions to the surface for all of us to do battle with. As a society bringing the questions to the surface shapes the audience experience and makes it something as unforgettable as art should be.
Humans take precious time to interact with art. Art should shake all of the cells in our body so that we are never the same way again after interacting with it.