The Weight of a Story with Danielle Deadwyler

Danielle Deadwyler: I would be reading to the students when I was teaching elementary school, and read aloud is just like, it was the opportunity to make something go from the written form into the vocal grandeur, and I loved doing it, and they dug it too. Who don't want to be read to? Who doesn't want a personal intimate performance? That's what it was. And that was the thing that made me go, “Something's missing. Oh yeah, let me get back.”

Leticia Ridley: Welcome to Daughters of Lorraine, a podcast from your friendly neighborhood Black feminists exploring the legacies, present, and futures of Black theatre. We are your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

Jordan Ealey: And Jordan Ealey. This is a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. And on it we discuss Black theatre history, conduct interviews with local, national and international Black theatre artists, scholars and practitioners, and discuss plays by Black playwrights that have our minds buzzing.

Leticia: Danielle Deadwyler is a multidisciplinary performance artist, actor, and filmmaker. An Atlanta native Deadwyler is rooted in theatre, dance, and creative writing. Hometown staples such as Gate City Heritage House, Total Dance Theater, Gary Harrison Studios, Atlanta Street Theater, Henry W. Grady High School, and Spelman College cumulatively honed Deadwyler amongst a distinctly southern landscape. As a graduate student under Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, she focused her analysis on issues facing women and African Americans while attaining a Master's of Arts in American Studies from Columbia University.

Jordan: As a professional actor, Deadwyler has performed in productions with Kenny Leon's True Colors Theater, Horizon Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre, Theatrical Outfit, Aurora Theatre, and the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre. She was the Creative Loafing Atlanta Critics Pick for Best Actress in 2013, and Readers’ Pick for Best Performance Artist in 2017. In 2015, she was a winning recipient of the Suzi Bass Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play.

Deadwyler has since performed in numerous television and film roles, presented nationally and internationally. Deadwyler starred as Mamie Till in Till, which earned her a host of critical acclaim and nominations from BAFTA, Critics Choice, and SAG. Most recently she portrayed Bernice in the Netflix adaptation of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, and her film The Woman in the Yard is out now in theatres.

Leticia: Well, I just want to express along with Jordan, gratitude for you agreeing to be on the podcast, but also as someone who just really admires your work. The fact that you're in here, I'm a little star struck because the subtlety in—

Danielle: Get out of here! Let's talk.

Leticia: ... what you portray Black life across spectrums truly feels like a love letter to your people. And I just truly, truly, truly appreciate that as someone who gets to consume and enjoy your work. So I would just say that, but yes, we're going to get into it as well. So first question, we like to warm it up here. How did you come to theatre and acting? What was the spark that led you to pursue this professionally? Did you always know you wanted to be an actress?

Danielle: No, I did not. I think I was very aware that this was just a part of my life. Black Atlanta art in the eighties and the nineties had a stronghold on community in a certain way. And if you came up seeing Jomandi, if you came up seeing anything at the Alliance Theatre, particularly when led by Kenny Leon, if you came up in Atlanta Children's Theatre, just critical folks who were heading Black theatre at the time in conjunction with dance and visual art. Visual art being seen consecutively, years at the National Black Arts Festival, it was massive.

People were coming from all over the country. Dance was pivotal in my life since I was four or five years old, and dance always has had a theatrical component to it. And so my rearing is centered around this multimedia interdisciplinary work because I did dance exhibitions with Gary Harrison Studios or Total Dance Theater, Dancical Productions, these are critical institutions at my time of learning, of arts education. And they were always theatre mixed with dance, mixed with music, mixed with poetry, mixed with…mixed with this, everything is swirling all together. And that's how I came to understand art as a practice in my life, it was just ubiquitous and ever-present.

So I didn't necessarily think, “Oh, I'm going to do this as a professional.” Public education is rearing, is pushing you towards other things, other disciplines, other subjects are given a pedestalization that art does not get, even though I feel like I had art in every capacity in my educational experience, but I was trained to look for something more stable.

Leticia: A Black proverb.

Danielle: Sure. And that led me to going into education, led me to academia for graduate exploration, but art was always present. And performance art in various media was always present. And after going through an initial graduate program, teaching elementary school for a couple of years, feeling like something was missing, and then pivoting and doing an audition for a play that I had done before in high school, had done before in college: for colored girls. I auditioned for a professional production that was directed by Jasmine Guy and that was why…

Leticia: I feel like Atlanta doesn't really get its props for how central they are to what we know as Black art worldwide, and also Black theatre. I think there's other places people often go to tell the story of Black theatre. And I think what you just articulated for us was this deep entrenchment and importance of Black art broadly, Black theatre, Black dance, visual art I think is... Someone needs to write a book. I'm looking at you, Jordan ATL-lien.

Jordan: I don't know with me, Addae, Amina McIntyre, Angela Farr Schiller, we've all kind of thought about some sort of anthol—… Maybe I'm giving away trade secrets, but we've thought about some sort of anthology around Black art in Atlanta, so who knows, maybe it will be coming soon. But I appreciated you articulating that also as someone who grew up there and had that same... It's like it wasn't even Black art so much.

Danielle: It was just art.

Jordan: Because Black art was everywhere. Black people were just everywhere all the time. And so then when you get into this professional industry, you're like, “Wait, I'm a minority, that's weird.” But also when you're talking about all the multi-disciplines that both inspired your creative life, but also you yourself are, people say the multi-hyphenate, right? You're an actor, you're a dancer, performance artist, you also do visual art, so many different things. And how would you describe your creative ethos in working across these multiple mediums? What is that thing that inspires you to create or the thing that may.... What are you trying to say sometimes with your art?

Everything moves through my lens—my Black lens, my Black woman lens, my Black southern woman lens, and I've realized that I can't keep them separate anymore.

Danielle: I guess extending the web is the ethos. How do you expand it from the small form? See, I've been reading this David Hammons reader, edited by Kellie Jones, and so I'm thinking of one of those initial pieces that's in there by Ben Okri, it's a poem, and he said, “The smaller the form, the bigger the conversation.” And that's just been rocking with me this year, but I think that that's something that is across the board. How does something be so concentrated and yet expansive? It is having a conversation with everything else, and I think I'm always trying to connect all of my work in some way. Everything moves through my lens, my Black lens, my Black woman lens, my Black southern woman lens, and I've realized that I can't keep them separate anymore. Oh, film and TV lives over here, theatre’s here, performance art is here. No, the lines are blurred, and there's a connective tissue, there's blood, there's nerves, there's veins, there's fascia. Got to break that up, get a good massage.

Nonetheless, all that stuff is there together. How am I having a cross medium conversation? I think that's what's driving me as a professional. And so it's not just a commercial effort, it makes it something grander. It makes it more fundamental, and radical, and deeply rooted. I'm trying to weave something. I'm trying to connect the dots.

Leticia: I know you don't need another job, but you would be great at telling sleep stories. There's just something very soothing about your voice.

Danielle: I need to be at the call map?

Leticia: You have a very soothing voice. Random.

Jordan: She does audiobooks. We talked about The Street because you did The Street by Ann Petry, which is my freaking, one of my favorite books. And you did the audio for that.

Danielle: You know what, I had an era of doing a lot of audiobooks. I'm not going to give y'all the tea tea, but I did a bunch of audiobooks of various genres. Wink wink.

Leticia: Okay, that's a deep cut. Deep cut, a deep cut. Remember that podcast, Jordan we listened to the story podcast on the way to Atlanta.

Jordan: Oh, the Purple Panties podcast.

Leticia: Yeah, that makes me think of that audio soap opera by Zane.

Danielle: That's so crazy you say that because that's the thing that made me go, “I need to be performing again. I miss art. This is my thing.” Because I would be reading to the students when I was teaching elementary school, and read aloud is just like, it was the opportunity to make something go from the written form into the vocal grandeur, and I loved doing it, and they dug it too. Who doesn't want to be read to? Who doesn't want a personal intimate performance? That's what it was. And that was the thing that made me go, “Something's missing.” Oh yeah, let me get back.

Leticia: Yeah, there's something about children and how they buy into performance in all different aspects. I have two or three young nieces now, but one of them, the middle child, Skylar “Piler,” whenever I go home, she's very musical, and when she was young she always would dance, interpretive dance like slow songs. She always had rhythm. She loves to sing. She loves to play instruments.

And last time when I went home, I randomly liked to do weird things with them. So I created a show at the Apollo night where we started performing and she'd be like, “Okay, TT your turn.” And we would go back and forth making up songs on the spot. So much so where the whole family just started to engage in this sort of random performance dance for nobody but us. And the way they just sort of lit up and leaned into that, just really made me appreciate what performance and art can do for young people, and how it seems to activate them differently in a lot of ways, especially in a world that seems to sort of be trying to submerge what art can do beyond frivolous fun. I just really appreciate that about my experience with her, but that's like a tangent.

Danielle: No, it's not a tangent, it's a connective tissue. It is what it is. We should be having it at all points of our life, it is not just a point of commerce. It is an intimate experience too. It is a form of education in certain spaces, but it doesn't just live there, it lives daily, it lives all the time. We draw back to a TV show that we've watched, and infuse it into our conversations with our people, with our peers, at the club, whatever, wherever you're having your social fits or whatnot, it is our life. It is our life.

Leticia: Right, right, right.

Jordan: One of my collaborators always says, “Art changes culture and culture changes policy.” That's Ari Afsar who says that, that's her artist statement. I think about that all the time because it does change cultural consciousness, when you are watching something that you may not have even thought about before. And that can lead, I'm not saying it always does, but it can lead to actual real change if you let it.

Danielle: You can think presently, and I haven't watched it yet, but that the show Adolescence on Netflix apparently is doing something vigorous to people and making them reconsider what phones are doing to youth. It's always been a part of the conversation, but this is rattling the bell in a whole ‘nother way.

Jordan: Good.

Leticia: Well, speaking of Netflix, it's like you knew where we were going, and let's travel to the world of commerce a little bit. You recently were in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson on Netflix, one of the black theatre gods that I would say. It's like black theatre like, “Oh, August Wilson.”

Jordan:Lorraine Hansberry, but that one play.

Leticia: But that one play. “Lorraine Hansberry made that one play” is so right. Can you talk a bit about your experience approaching Wilson's work for film? I don't know if you had done Wilson in a theatre space, but if you did, did you find any differences in the preparation?

Danielle: I had not, have not done a Wilson production.

Leticia: Oh, wow.

Danielle: I know. What in the world? But I've done plenty of readings, and I've seen a host of them, and I just prepared to do a play. That's what it merits, it's just way more intimate. But you can't take away the urgency of the language, that rhythm. I'm just going to say it, you can't fuck with that, you can't unfuck with it, you have to just be in it and sit yourself down. And the frame, the intentional frame, sound and vision image coming together for film is our director and our crew's intention. But as an actor, you better prepare to do a play.

Leticia: I feel like that when I watched The Piano Lesson, and also even the other Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Fences are the other two that's already been done, and I know the idea is to do all ten of the cycle. But I felt like the intimacy of the theatre is something that it was so sacred to all of the adaptations that it made me appreciate it. I think sometimes the intention is to disrupt that, and to try to do the magic of film overly too much. And we know our brother Wilson was long-winded with their monologues, but his language was so luscious, and that rhythm, so many people that I think Jordan and I have talked to, talks about the rhythm of doing Wilson's work, and that being important to the outcome of how it's going to be perceived. Because they're like if you've ever heard bad Wilson rhythm, then you realize that you're seeing a bad Wilson production and that's not within the language, and you really have to seek yourself within it.

Danielle: We get long-winded. Once you're in it, you begin to, or I just know that about how Black people are, Black family is, and it's just heightened when it comes to Wilson. It's urgent as fuck when it comes to Wilson. But it's just critical to think about it as a play because it deserves that.

And I think Malcolm, Malcolm Washington, who directed Piano Lesson for the Netflix production, did a beautiful job of bringing us into the cinematic world. Of bringing us image that correlated to the monologues that made a different kind of Wilson experience for the screen and for the stream. You like that? But you had to live in the play in order to capture it right, the way you have to capture a film, you have to have the muscle for the play.

Leticia: When you told boy Willie to step up off of that piano, I was like, “Boy…

Danielle: You better get your ass up out of that piano!

Leticia: “You better step to the side." Man, I was captivated by you before, but that's like I said earlier.

Jordan: And Piano Lesson is one of my favorite Wilsons, which is hard to say because there's so many that I love. But specifically because of the character of Bernice and being... I think because August Wilson has been called out for many, many decades by many, many Black feminists about the way he portrays women, rightfully so, present company included. Also we had Pearl Cleage on the podcast a few seasons ago, and she talked about that and also her work, Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous being in response to that. So we know this legacy, but what was it like portraying this character of Bernice, who I personally feel is one of the better written women roles in the Wilson canon? How do you find those nuances with her to make sure that the complexities of her story come out?

Danielle: I've just been privy to a lot of different Black women actor OGs who've poured into me, and what it means to find that gut. I'm with Black people, that's pretty much it. I'm with Black folks, so I know Black folks. I got a Black family with all of the shit that comes with Black family, and how it turns to fertilizer for a Black family, and I get to see all of the bloom too, and that's what you have to throw into every inch of it. It doesn't hurt to have had the kind of artistic background that I've had. A lot of my art practice was led by Black women, Black women and queer folks. And so it's given me a rigor and discipline to my practice, but also my cultural understanding of self, my historical understanding of self, and how we've had to be. And so you just meld all of that together in order to hone into every aspect of who a character is, but especially who Bernice is, the magnitude of grief from lost love romantically, and lost love, familial.

The horrors and terror and trauma of American history, of Southern American history, but just American history because it chased her, and it is an inescapable component of Black migration, and Black presence across the United States. And the hope and the optimism that comes with moving into these spaces, and yet the hate that is always present regardless of where you are in the... So just having all of that on you, man, that's why we be hunched over.

Jordan: It's so true.

Danielle: How you be hunched over and standing divinely erect at the same time, that's that.

Jordan: And I shared this with you, but I had the pleasure, I'm here at University of Rochester in Black Studies, and we had the pleasure of having C. Riley Snorton here, and he gave a lecture about your performance in, oh, The Harder They Fall.

Danielle: Yes yes yes.

Jordan:The Harder They Fall. Professor Snorton is I want to say our foremost scholar of Black Trans Studies, I want to say. I had the pleasure of listening to this talk and also talking to him afterwards being like, “Oh my God, hearing you talk about Danielle's work is really amazing because I've gotten a chance to work with her and everything.” And he was like, “the care that she brought to the performance, it was something that really stuck with me and I hope... I know I did a good job of talking about the nuances of her portrayal,” which was so amazing to hear. And so that leads into my next question of one having had the honor of working with you on several live performance and performance art projects and that care work. You're talking about what you've learned from other Black women and queer people, but what does it also mean to treat these as spaces of care too when you're both as a creator, but also when you're being entrusted, for example, to portray a marginalized person that doesn't get that kind of recognition?

Danielle: It's a massive weight—

Jordan: One thing about care.

Danielle: ...but one that you take on. I've seen that enacted the way folks poured into me and other people who were growing alongside me. Our history is critical, the way they talk to us… We're eight! And they're coming at us like it's important, this is deathly and lively, that ain't a word, but it's both of them adverbs together. That's how they were making it that significant at that age, I did not take that lightly, that kind of repetition of understanding that this is a part of you has stuck, it stuck heavily.

And so that artistic understanding, and then having an academic background in history and other interdisciplinary studies, that just transfers to the professional work that I've been enabled to do. And when you're handling the work of building character based on a family, and dealing with an estate, that's just how you're supposed to do it. This is something that will have residual effects for a long time, it's locked in on film, on celluloid, on whatever. And then not to mention whatever kind of madness the internet breeds, and so you want to do extreme justice. It's just giving yourself over. It's spiritual, art is spiritual, the practice is spiritual, and so the way you care for something should be a part of that same thing. So I have been privileged to working with the Wilson estate and having conversation with them in the lead up to promoting the film. Not to mention working on Till and dealing with the Till family estate, you want to honor them, you want to honor their family, and you want to honor them as well.

Leticia: I love that. I love your philosophy on care, and how you think so deeply about the communities and the work that you're doing is accountable to, and I think that's just a different relationship you put us in to the work, so I appreciate it. It reminds me of very much like an Ava DuVernay and how I feel when I'm engaging with her work. Would you ever play, I know we have twenty million thousand Beneatha Youngers of the world because we've had five thousand films. Would you ever play Ms. Beneatha?

Danielle: Well, no, if I'm aging out, fam.

Leticia: Wait, how old?

Jordan: Beneatha is twenty-one.

Leticia: But they wasn't hiring twenty-one-year-olds to play her, no?

Danielle: I don't know. I'm not going to say no to nothing, but I am saying I'm on hiatus. I'm on hiatus from things in a certain way.

Leticia: Rest is also important.

Danielle: Rest is critical. Balance is critical, so I'm trying to bring balance into the fold. I'm not done. Drama is my life. But the other side has to be just like we were talking before, we got to crack it with the recording humor is something that we need in this time, and smart humor in order to learn how to navigate through these spaces. We still live, we still dance, we still fuck, we still sing, we still make great music. They still make genius shit, somebody's doing something amazing right now, and it is in conversation with this moment.

Leticia: Right. Do you find any differences with acting on stage versus acting for film?

Danielle: Yeah, everything is smaller. It's so much more concentrated, and so much intimate. There's an intimacy with the camera because everything's witnessed there, you don't have to do much. It will see that you have a low estrogen, and so that makes a muscle move that if you're feeling it, if you're feeling the feelings, your body will do things that you don't quite know, but the camera knows. There's a dance that is happening with the technical component that you are not registering it as it is happening.

But there is a choreography in a sense that's happening with crew depending upon what the project is and what it calls for, but you don't need none of that when you standing on a proscenium, whether you're in the round or you're... It doesn't matter, you control that, and once you're on the train and you're riding, there's no stop and go, you just know. It's a beautiful relationship of just jumping on the horse, and it's an immediate conversation with the audience. Everything's different, every night. Everybody say the same thing.

I really, I'm not going to say nothing too new about what it means to be on stage. And it's the first thing, I'm going back. You ain't got to ask. I'm going to already tell you, and it's not even a going back, it's like I'm always present. I'm always attuned to what's happening in theatre. I'm always trying to get to a show. I saw Jaja's African Hair Braiding Shop not too long ago at True Colors Theater. I went to see Fool for Love at Steppenwolf last week. So it's just like you want to be in the moment of a thing with people.

Jordan: Well, just on this theatre train for a second, are there plays that you find yourself constantly coming back to? People always say favorite play, but more so plays that have stuck with you, Black plays that you keep coming back to that either maybe you're like, "Oh, maybe I'll perform this one day," but also as a writer, as just an artist, those kind of works.

Danielle: Honestly, I haven't been reading a whole ton of plays. But I think about one woman shows or one person shows often, and what it means to bear that load or two-handers. I strangely come back to Top Dog/Underdog for some reason. I saw with my boy Corey Hawkins did it at that…[on Broadway]...

Leticia: Oh, really.

Danielle: ... when Piano Lesson had its Broadway run as well. That's a major thing, like siblings and how do you navigate those relationships, and the weight of family. Not to mention know when Whoopi was on Broadway for her piece, which is navigating a kind of dramedy zone, and just performance art in general, they go hand in hand. I was just watching this interview that John Leguizamo did with Hasan Minhaj. Damn, he did a ton of one-man shows, critically, historically explorative shows.

And so I just think about that because I value the work of comedians. I value the work of people who are getting up there, and intuitively moving through something that has structure, and still being able to make people laugh and oscillate into the, “Where are you going, this is serious,” and then gut punching you in a certain way. I find comedians to be very bold and courageous.

Leticia: Corey, I don't know if you're ever going to listen to this podcast, but you always welcome at Daughters of Lorraine. Shoot or shoo, that's all I'm saying.

Danielle: I'ma tell him. I'ma tell him.

Jordan: Listen, me and Leticia, when we went to see Topdog/Underdog at Canadian Stage what's that a year ago, and we were just blown away by that piece.

Leticia: We never got it. We never got it until we seen it stage. I read Topdog/Underdog three billion times.

Jordan: But we understood it on a theoretical level. But just the heat of that piece on stage... Also, I wanted to say there is a, I believe the first production with two women of Topdog/Underdog going up somewhere in—

Danielle: That's what I'm talking about.

Jordan: ... Massachusetts. I just saw it.

Danielle: That's what I'm talking about.

Jordan: And I'm like, “Do I need to drive over to Massachusetts to see this?” I'm curious about how that plays with women. I really am with all the gender stuff, and all the... I'm so curious about—

Danielle: Are they playing them as men or are they playing them as women?

Leticia: Right.

Jordan: Right.

Danielle: Oh, that is so compelling.

Jordan: And I know Suzan-Lori Parks is probably going to love that. She's like, "Heck yeah."

Danielle: And just constantly coming back to Suzan-Lori Parks's stuff is just...

Leticia: Yeah, right. Suzan-Lori Parks is so big in Black theatre that on the pilot, I think it's the pilot of Girlfriends they mentioned her winning the Pulitzer Prize, and you would never think that those two worlds would intersect in that way. I was just so shocked. I was like, “Oh, they talking about Topdog/Underdog.”

Danielle: Black Hollywood knows what's up. We know what's up. People know what's up.

Leticia: And there seems like to be such a strong connection actually, say probably Black Hollywood and Black theatre, so many... And Jordan and I have talked about this in the past and on podcasts, so much of our older Black actors and the actresses came from the Negro Ensemble Company, born and bred in the theatre. And that you could see that, and there's such a sort of reverence, Denzel's back on Broadway and now he over here selling out box offices.

Danielle: That lineage. Donald Griffin was a huge impact on me as an actor who derived from Atlanta, but worked across US stages. Carole Mitchell-Leon taught me in the Atlanta Children's Theater. These are folks who derived from the folks who were doing it in the sixties and the seventies. That's the legacy. And you just hope that it persists in spite of the way projects get to be made today in film and TV.

The theatre legacy is strong. People just have to do the legwork of knowing that that's where it comes from. Everything is not from content creators. And more power to them and all love to them, but the work of rigor with regard to Black performance on screen is the pipeline from Black America.

Jordan: And you mentioned even Jasmine Guy being a director, and I was just telling someone, I was like the first time I ever saw The Colored Museum on stage, this is what it is growing up in Atlanta, was a production directed by Jasmine Guy and I saw them. Yes, on stage when I was, I don't know, early high school. It's just like those plays that most people don't get to read until they're in college, or even in grad school. That's why, obviously not to be on a soapbox about DEI or whatever, but it's like growing up in areas where Black art, or artists of color are supported. You get those things that you wouldn't normally get in—

Danielle: You can step up on that soap box.

Jordan: ... other spaces. I feel like this whole season is going to be me doing that.

Danielle: I brought my own box so I can stand.

Jordan: I do it every week on Monday, Wednesday 12:30 to 1:25 in my Black Feminist Theory class.

Danielle: And that's critical. This Black femme theory is necessary when it comes to thinking about how we have crafted these scenes. And that's why so much of my work is... Or my work in general is just looking at Black motherhood and Black women's labor, and the dynamism of what it means to move through all these kinds of spaces. I'm connecting the performance art themes to film and TV things as much as I possibly can, because that's where I'm coming from.

Some people will understand certain nuances of the performance more so than others, just because they have a certain understanding of the legacy of the kind of work that I've done, or the people that I've come from. They'll just get where I'm moving through, and it makes people fall back into other films and whatnot. And so you will see the legacy of navigating labor and society as a Black woman.

Leticia: Well, before we let you go because we know you are busy, booked and busy with some rest, and well-balanced.

Danielle: Rest.

Leticia: Rest. We at Daughters of Lorraine always like to conclude our episodes with recommendations for our listeners. So do you have any recommendations to watch, listen-

Danielle: Watch, listen, read.

Leticia: ... read whatever you have for them.

Danielle: Okay, here we go. Here we go. Here we go. One of my OGs, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, she is a visual artist, a experimental filmmaker, just doing really dynamic work. I would say check out her work. My big homie, Ebony Blanding has a film coming, she's working on that. She's a filmmaker out of Atlanta. She has things on her website. I've worked with her. Check out her work. We did a thing called “Talk to Plants” together. And at a time where we are not listening to nature, I implore you go outside, get some fricking Vitamin D, and talk to the plants and watch Eb's short. I said earlier I'm reading David Hammond's, the David Hammond's reader which was edited by Kellie Jones, that's been delightful too, to dig into. I'm also reading... Let me go get it.

Jordan: The listeners can't see, but Danielle’s literally run off the screen.

Leticia: Because it's that good y'all.

Jordan: It's that good, you have to see it.

Danielle: Survival is a Promise, it's Alexis Pauline Gumbs work on Audre Lorde. I'm also reading Mohammed el-Kurd's Rifqa. He also has a new one out, I don't know the name of it, but I am just enamored with him as a poet, and how critical he is in thinking about and connecting the US and the Middle East, and the fight for survival.

What else? What did I watch? Watch Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross is doing some fun stuff. RaMell is also just one who is working through the narrative space as well as the film and TV space, as well as visual art. I saw his work up in Chicago at the Art Institute, and he had some beautiful inkjet prints of nature, and just Black folks. So that kind of care, the care you would see in me, you see it in how RaMell was handling work across the board, that's what I get into.

Jordan: And can you tell us anything that is coming up, upcoming—

Danielle: Upcoming.

Jordan: ... things. And where to find you if you want to keep up with you as well.

Danielle: I'm not a social media girlie, but I do got some stuff out, Woman in the Yard is out in theatre.

Jordan: And it's so interesting when you bring that up, you worked with Okwui on that, right? And we talked about—

Danielle: Look here anything Okwui does, how about that? I love this woman. She inspired me years ago, her performance artwork, I went to see it at BAM. And I've seen multiple things of Okwui's, but also the documentary exploring the work, just the intensity, the care, the love of Black women's experience from girlhood to adulthood, that's what she's been navigating for a long time.

And so to play in the Woman in the Yard together was just my freaking delight. What else? There's a film called 40 Acres, did that up in the north of Toronto, so that's fun. Some apocalyptic thriller type stuff, and digging into a Black and Indigenous family, and what it means to try to uphold culture, uphold history, uphold family. So I think that'll be some exciting stuff forthcoming.

Jordan: Oh my God, I cannot tell you how big of a just delight this was. I know—

Danielle: You got it.

Jordan: ... we'd be going for hours, and hours, and hours. But this was so great Dani, Danielle Deadwyler, thank you for joining us.

Danielle: My delight. I love and appreciate y'all. Thank you.

Leticia: This has been another episode of Daughters of Lorraine. We're your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

Jordan: And Jordan Ealey. We'll see you on our next episode. You definitely won't want to miss it. In the meantime, if you're looking to connect with us, please follow us on Instagram at daughtersoflorrainepod. You can also email us at [email protected] for further contact.

Leticia: Our theme music is composed by Enza Bomba, the Daughters of Lorraine podcast is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. It's available on iTunes, Spotify, and howlround.com. If you're looking for the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, you'll want to search and subscribe to Daughters of Lorraine podcast.

Jordan: If you loved this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms, this helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay or TV event the theater community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com, and submit your ideas to the Commons.