Black Women Performers: ‘I Don’t Want to Do Anything Else’

Abstract

In March 2021, Naila Keleta-Mae interviewed actors, storytellers and creators Jewelle Blackman, Djennie Laguerre and Ordena Stephens-Thompson individually over Zoom. She asked each of them seven questions, which she also answered herself. Blackman, Laguerre, Stephens-Thompson and Keleta-Mae are Black women performers with work experience in a range of genres, languages and audience demographics, across the world. None of the questions Keleta-Mae posed asked the interviewees to speak specifically about gender and race as these are often the only things Black women artists are asked to address. As Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994) taught us, Black women live at the intersection of race and gender, and so blackness and femaleness are embedded in their responses. This chapter is a collage of individual conversations brought together on the page to put these women in conversation with each other and the reader, documenting what they were thinking about performance in this particular moment.