Black Joy - Lessons from Episode 9

NYC 2020

I love hosting my new podcast, I’ve Been Thinking (shameless plug) because I am privileged to hold space for the thoughts of fellow creatives who, like myself, are wrestling with artistic identity, a quickly shifting industry, and what it means to live, work, and create with authenticity. Even as I sit writing this post, the news was just released earlier today, Broadway will remain closed throughout 2020. The worst-kept secret in recent memory, the one we feared and yet understood to be the most responsible choice was splashed across every post shared on my social media feeds. I've spent the last several weeks having conversations with so many fellow actors trying to lean on their interpretation of this moment we find ourselves navigating. Yes, COVID-19 certainly shuttered the curtains but, the reckoning around systemic racism and its impact on our industry have placed even greater weight on an already fracturing foundation. Dozens of hours I have interviewed actors – Black, brown, and not – to reconcile the communal narrative calling for transparency, accountability, and a commitment to actionable steps towards accountability.  

In the middle of these conversations, I spoke with Maya Richardson, a self-described baby-artist. She immediately stole my heart with her genuine sense of self, earnestness, and hunger to see space created for performers of every manifestation. We laughed, commiserated, and just chatted in the way creatives tend to do. As artists, we are quick to form community and connection, as we know this to be an inherent part of our artistic DNA. So much of what we discussed was like soul food to my heart, filling and comforting. However, she shared a statement that, while I've heard before, articulated in her earnestness just clutched its nails into my heart and hasn't let go yet.

Maya Richardson

"Black joy and black self-love is so radical when the whole world tries to strip you of everything about you. When you can fight back and be like, "I love this, and I'm learning how to love it. And I'm unpacking all of that." We're so conditioned to think that unloading our traumas on white audiences is the only thing we can offer. And we're a lot more than that."

I love that. This is why I love having conversations with people like Maya because it makes me think more deeply. It's true, the concept of Black joy is indeed radical. I immediately began filtering my thoughts to remember, "When was the last time that I really saw Black joy on the stage?" The bottling of the Black narrative has been so mired in educating others about our history, which is important, but we are so much more than that. And we haven't been given the space to explore that on a larger and more consistent scale.

I began questioning, is this one of the ways that we, as Black artists have been complicit to the currently broken industry dynamic. It is understood that Black and brown artists have historically struggled with the idea of, is there enough to go around? You see a show, there are two black roles that they're going to cast. And so how can you be both a working actor and also hold onto these ideals that you genuinely believe in. The idea that my Blackness is not being fully explored and being given the space to showcase, explore, and celebrate is heartbreaking. All that being Black is instead forced into flat depictions. Our experiences stripped down into accessories to the White narrative. Either tokenized or forced to bleed our historical trauma for mass consumption in an attempt to be marketable.

        These are the nuances that non-people of color don't understand. And I honor the fact that because it's not their lived experience, we are not always confronting willful bias or willful barriers. Instead, we are stumbling over actual gaps in non-POC understanding of the carefully tread journey to navigate being a Black or brown person in an industry that is predominantly set up to make you feel as though you only have so much to offer of value in order to occupy that desired space.

And so, we end up in the same sticky place of fighting for authenticity as an artist of color. It is one of the things that you have to reconcile. I remain hopeful that we are getting to a place where this won't be the decision that every artist of color has to contemplate as they pursue a career in mainstream theatre. This question, if I am authentically who I'm supposed to be as a Black artist, am I okay with what that means for my career? Am I okay with the fact that that means that I may not work as often? That I may not be as bookable as people would want me to be. Am I willing to trade perceived success for the knowledge that I'm comfortable knowing that I brought with me the authentic, full representation of who I am as an artist every time I walked into the room? While those are decisions that all actors have to make, I think it's a very specific choice that Black and brown artists have to make.

I have certainly struggled with the existential crisis of being who this industry says I need to be to book. Recently, this whole dirty topic of typecasting and who created the type that we're supposed to fit in reared its ugly head in my little empathetic heart. And I remember having this conversation with my vocal coach, and I said to him, in one of those moments where I was in tears as I told him, "I know what they want when I walk in the room, and that's not fully me." 

"They see me. I'm a curvy black girl. They want me to just wail and have serve it…and my truth is much softer than that. I have a much softer offering of Black femaleness." I remember saying to him, "I don't know how I'm going to reconcile those things." And thank God I have an amazing vocal coach. Eddie, if you're reading this, love to you. Eddie was like, "Be who you are." He said, "You have to be who you are. You cannot try to embody what you believe their stereotype of you is going to be. Ultimately, you will find people who are going to be brave enough and smart enough to see you in the same way that you see yourself."

"Black joy and black self-love is so radical when the whole world tries to strip you of everything about you."

That is the part space I have thrown my whole self into. Embracing the idea of joy as a byproduct of my self-love being the ultimate act of rebellion in a world and an industry that would like to mass produce my Black experience without considering all the parts they miss by not being brave enough to loosen the chokehold and letting our Blackness shine without restraint.