Talking With The Lorde: A Choreopoem
Saturday, August 9th

Iman Carter, Naa Akua, Nikkie McLeod, Yvonne Quaye, Sherese Francis, & Victoria Westfield

Stage Manager: Malena Logan

An Amplified Embodied Stage Reading

In 1976 Ntozake Shange coined the phrase “Choreopoem” when she wrote For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, told poetically through the voices of seven women fighting and barely surviving historical and systemic "isms." In 1979 Audre Lorde spoke to us through Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices, “We cannot live without our lives,” told poetically through the voices of four women after twelve black women were killed in Boston within four months.In 2025 I write Talking With The Lorde: A Choreopoem embedding Audre Lorde’s quotes, “We Cannot Live Without Our Lives,” and “ I Am Weary Of Need That Taste Like Destruction” (Need), as a way to pay homage to the breadth of Audre Lorde’s warrior spirit, to provide a sonic space to hold the spectrum of blackness, gift the unwrapped freedom to fully express rage (in all forms & all paces)—and embody choral defiance that is not seen through the white gaze, rather the all-seeing eyes of the black chorus.
CONTENT WARNING: Profanity, and mature subject matter.