So in September of 2016 I was tasked with creating a solo to be performed in the November. I mean it's not like i didnt know it was coming up... being at the university for the previous years I had gone by seeing the previous year groups grace the stage with their own solo's. However when it comes to creating that solo on your own it becomes about you, you and only you. Where I'm used to creating work collaboratively, this was a very quick and weird change, however I seemed to adapt to the situation quite quickly. Working with the power of music and the power of knowledge from artists gone before me, I was able to create a solo called 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'. My solo was about the preconceptions of the black person on stage, however it was performed through the lense of a metaphor of a bird in a cage.
So the general concept was that as black people we are trapped in our preconceptions and stereotypes of what our performance may contain on stage. Looking into black activists, one of my favourite poets and authors, Maya Angelou, kept coming up as a recurring theme and i decided to read her book 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' to understand her injustice because of her skin colour. I then continued to look at her poem about the literal caged bird and the poem which this was heavily influenced by (which was a poem called Sympathy written by Paul Dunbar Lawrence) created my motif's of movement to execute the piece. Working with a carnival costume and a nest I was able to create something which served an essence of the freedom of carnival, with the trapped nature of freedom and fact that freedom is in fact just a representation and really we are actually still encaged in our stereotypes. For an audience member as the piece is metaphorical, it can be empathetic to any struggle that they may be going through or have experienced in the past. Music powered by Nina Simone and the sound of racist news reports from the 60's set the scene for what was to become an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally connecting piece.
Photo Credit: Amy Wills