I believe the calling for my life is to help others become healthier and happier human beings through art. I am a very sensitive person who is easily fascinated by people’s stories and equally disturbed by their pain and suffering. The art of theater and performance is a healing art of the soul, and once the soul is healed it is my belief that the body will follow. In my experience things that cannot be taught to the mind are understood through the heart in the form of self- expressed creativity. My objective is to take this idea and expand upon it.
Most people attend the theater with the expectation of being entertained. My goal is to create a theater experience where audiences are not only entertained but enlightened about the social, economic and cultural circumstances in our own country, as well as other countries that inspire storytelling in its purest form. I consider myself a midwife of stories new and old...theatre is a spiritual experience and Im proud to be its medium.
My name is Britney ( Brit) Frazier and I am an artist;The tools of my trade are my being and intuition, my pallet is theater, my chosen mediums are playwrighting and acting . I create my art from a place of truth and with the knowledge that this medium has the power to awaken the humanity in the complacent ,and sometimes, dark and painful parts of our being. I paint with many colors and with fervent brush strokes of various emotions. I am a spirit -writer, meaning I listen and write what I hear. I am a medium to the medium. I write stories that reconnect parts of the African American experience from the West African (Yoruba religion) to the various experiences of African Americans in America today. I do this through the study of Yoruban patakis ( folktales) and what I am able to draw from my own experience and environment. This was the blueprint for my play Obeah. I call on playwrights like Terrell Alvin McCraney for inspiration because of his brilliant use of the Yoruban archetypes ( Orishas) in contemporary settings and narratives, knowing in contrast and addition, for my own artistry, I 'd like to try to create plays using the Orishas in contemporary settings, while keeping the details of the ancient patakis in tact, and exploring how the Orishas navigate contemporary conflict.
I believe that myths are our lineage, especially as black people. For many African Americans, our myths are the pieces of our culture we had to forget to become American. Forgetting stories encoded with ancient knowledge from the ancestors, helpful to navigating our current surroundings as people of color contribute to many of us feeling lost. Going through academia , my theatrical arts education was filled with white male influences and the deeper I went into that world the more out of place I felt in the theatre. More reading and research lead me to the realization that the stories of the Egyptian Gods and Goddess, the Greek Gods, the Yourban Orishas and the Catholic Saints, were all alike and the ancestors of the groups listed, hailed Africa, meaning theatre started in Africa. After further reflection, I wondered how many other young theater lovers of color were taught that they had no place in theater history? Or how many people like me experience the reality that our cultural oral lineage isn’t relevant, because its not taught to us in historical theatre academia? I knew then that my place in the spirit writing world was to bring the patakis out of the incandescence of the Voodoo and Santeria religions, in a new way for the purpose of reconnecting us with our ancestors through storytelling. And as a result, uplifting youth of color and providing antidotes for our growing pains straight from the mouths of our ancestors in a context that all can relate to. If successful, I feel I can expose the world to the richness of West African , Santeria, Voodoo culture a hopefully expand our spot in theater history while dispelling the fear and stereotypes surrounding these practices.
Not all of my plays involve the reworking of the patakis, my play Dysphoria is perfect example of this, I also like exploring the personality traits if the Orishas when placed in the middle of contemporary conflict and how that conflict can either make them more human or amplify their godliness. In turn, I play with the question of ; Are conflict and struggle the things that make us human? Stemming from the idea that we are all made in the image of the Gods, Im interested in writing the moment when we, as humans, choose to let the God in us show ,in the moment we decide to began wearing our human visages again and why we go back and forth. I also tend to write plays that move. Meaning they involve a lot of movement or dance. I'm interested in playing with how the body expresses and evokes an emotional journey and helps map a relationship. They way people relate to each others bodies and touch is very telling of the kind of relationship they have and I have noticed, as a society, that we are scared to true intimacy. I play on that observed fear and how the release of repressed intimacy can bring about an array of emotions and memories for the actor and audience. The theater I write should evoke sounds, feelings, and visions. You should feel the story everywhere .I like for my plays to be fluid, and in turn the scenes bleed into one another, any break in the flow of my stories are deliberate. The emotional tangent I follow in my work is sometimes dark, but I attribute that to the African American experience being coated in struggle and caked in pain. I don’t shy away from this, these are the parts of us as a society that are still bruised, still in need of care and most of all in need of light and air in order for them to heal. My plays also involve the evocation of African Rituals and prayers on stage, calling on the metaphysical world to aid the the physical world in the story and hopefully resulting in a powerful, sometimes terrifying and truly moving experience in magical realism on stage. The ultimate goal is to provide a platform for people of color to remember our culture and talk through uncomfortable topics and experiences, releasing the negative and providing avenues for problem solving, support and healing.