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In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an
intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making
art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which
their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on
Bridgforth’s bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of
two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the
eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press).
Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding
her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and
live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices.
Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social
justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her
artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to
community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her
own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work
of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake
Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly
Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for
living a grounded artistic life.
Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel
Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix
Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view
of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work.
Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world
with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves
with lithe and associative grace through histories personal,
political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's
revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the
avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others,
Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends,
featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi
Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah
Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.
Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive,
multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of
judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh
Silverman, "continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in
the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer
theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while
creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it
is for." A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a
book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet,
scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light
and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the
condition and power of change in the world.
In a roving, shimmering conversation that took place in May 2021,
scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and playwright,
songwriter, performance artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones
discuss love as a foundational principle of artistic practice and
societal change. Reflecting on Love Like Light, Daniel Alexander
Jones's collection of seven plays and performance texts (published
by 53rd State in July 2021), DAJ and APG illuminate the ways in
which an attention to care, community, nuance, invitation,
perceptual particularities, and embodied conditions can resist the
profoundly extractive context in which life is lived and art is
made. As they discuss the work of Audre Lorde, Billie Holiday, Beah
Richards, Bayard Rustin, and Malcolm X, as well as that of DAJ's
grandma Daisy Mae and APG's grandmother, aunt, and niece, DAJ and
APG propose that love, like light, suffuses everything, and that
love, like light, creates a field in which transformation, justice,
healing, and radical beauty are not just possible-they are already,
now.
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