It’s a multimedia dance theater performance titled Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word Nigger, a title hard to type without flinching and impossible to speak. The show examines why that word is unredeemable in any form or spelling. After watching a video of the performance and communicating via email with its talented young creator, Jade Solomon Curtis, I encourage you to see it if you can. You’ll find yourself, I think, joined with an audience community in profound consideration of what it means to be born in a black body. For choreographer and dance artist Curtis, it means the responsibility to address “the reverb” of a word coined by whites to dehumanize black folks for all sorts of purposes. Her company’s vision statement: “Activism is the muse.”
The show is also beautiful, crafted with great thoughtfulness and care. At its center is a gripping conversation about the n-word with several older, gentle, learned onstage cohorts that expands to include the audience. Curtis herself is a teacher and concerned for young people of all races. This piece, she maintains, is for them. It opens with “a pre-show experience that incorporates video projections and hip-hop playlists curated by young people 15-18 years old,” she writes. The show goes on to argue that the current slang version, “nigga,” which is used in rap music and sometimes as a so-called term of endearment among black people, only prolongs the history of hate and self-hate. Read More