October
8, 2004
Staging
Black Femininity Series at Mount Holyoke This Fall
Photo: Todd M. LeMieux
Venus director Julia
Whitworth |
This fall the College’s theatre arts department
is hosting a series of events exploring theatrical representations
of race and gender titled Staging Black
Femininity. The centerpiece
of the series, which was funded in part by the President’s
Innovation Fund, is a production of Venus, a play by African
American Pulitzer Prize winner and Mount Holyoke alumna Suzan-Lori
Parks ’85. The play is based on the true story of Saartjie
Baartman, an African woman lured to Europe in 1810 and exhibited
nude in a London circus on account of her (purportedly) large
posterior. Her keepers referred to her as the “Hottentot
Venus.”
Venus director Julia Whitworth, visiting instructor
in theatre arts, chose the play after attending last spring’s community forum on diversity. She was
inspired by one student’s challenge to white professors to “pick
up the ball” in the work to combat racism on campus and beyond. “My
artistic and scholarly interests are in feminist and multicultural theatre,” explained
Whitworth. “I sat in the meeting thinking, ‘I can do that in the
theatre department.’”
Venus will be performed Wednesday, November 3,
through Saturday, November 6,
at 8 pm; Sunday, November 7, at 2 pm at Rooke Theatre.
For more information, contact the box office
at x2406.
For a schedule of events,
go to www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/
theat/annou.html. |
Venus, Whitworth admitted, is “an extraordinarily difficult play. It’s
tough to see and take. It deliberately engages offensive behavior to make people
look at deeply offensive history. For critics and scholars, the central debate
around the play is, ‘what does it mean to take this offensive history and
restage it?’ It goes right to the center of a question I’m interested
in: how representations of racial and sexual stereotypes have created aspects
of racism and sexism.”
Because the play is controversial, Whitworth
felt it was important to contextualize it by putting together
a series of lectures, films, and discussions that will engage
the issues of racial and sexual stereotyping in performance.
Over the summer, she consulted with various members of the Mount
Holyoke faculty and administration, including Michelle Stephens,
assistant professor of English, and Alumnae Association executive
director Rochelle Calhoun. “It’s all an effort to
illuminate how powerful the theatre can be as a space for dialogue
and activism, while it has also historically been a place for
oppression.”
“I believe in theatre that challenges us
to see the world more acutely,” Whitworth
said. “And what better place to perform Parks’s work than
here? She is such a significant voice in American theatre. That can be
inspiring to these students. I’d like them to know that the vital
role of a public intellectual is accessible for them, as well.”
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