Live & Digital Performances

Live and digital performance are the spaces where my research breathes. The works gathered here emerge from sustained engagement with Black life—its rhythms, interruptions, joys, and vulnerabilities—and use performance as a way of thinking more deeply about the world around us. My projects often begin with questions of memory, culture, and how Black identity is felt and cultivated alongside others. Each production is shaped by attention to everyday life through gesture, voice, movement, digital trace, and the quiet labor of being present.

Across stages and screens, my performances explore how Black life is carried through bodies, technologies, and memory. Live work foregrounds relationships between performer, text, space, and audience, while digital performance extends these relationships. This allows stories to travel, linger, and be revisited over time. Together, these forms hold space for questions that resist closure and for knowledge that unfolds through care, listening, and embodiment.

Grounded in Black feminist practice, this work values process as much as outcome. The performances linked here invite participation and witnessing rather than overexplaining theory. I also acknowledge that this documentation reflects varied performance conditions. Earlier works demonstrate what is possible within dedicated performance spaces, while more recent projects reveal the challenges of devised and collaborative work without consistent access to such environments. Like scientific research that requires a laboratory, performance research benefits from shared, purpose-built spaces—often described as a Performance Studies Laboratory.

My experience at Xavier has involved navigating these realities creatively, adapting performance practices to available spaces. This negotiation is itself part of the work, shaping how performance research responds to institutional context, material conditions, and collective possibility. While at Xavier, I have written, directed, performed, and produced original performances such as "Fish & Grits" and "Beauty Shop of Horrors." Additionally, I produced one guest artist show by 2014 alumni, Lexus D. Jordan titled, "The Mourning Show." Lexus is a direct product of the Performance Studies curriculum and a 2018 recipient of a M.A. from the Performance Studies concentration at LSU. She is also a participant in my 2020 workshop, "The Black Collective: A Performer's Toolbox."

"Mama Was Tired"

I created an original song-story recalling a childhood moment about my mother accidentally burning my ear with a hot comb. I performed this as part of Beauty Shop of Horrors. As I sing, images of my mother are projected behind me, weaving together sound, embodiment, and visual memory to hold Black hair as both an intimate mode of communication and a living history.

This performance reframes a moment that might otherwise be remembered only as painful or “horrific.” Rather than reinforcing stereotypes of Black motherhood as rooted in anger or aggression, the piece offers a fuller account of care shaped by exhaustion, love, responsibility, and survival. My mother’s tiredness, produced by the intersecting demands of labor, family, faith, and structural inequity, becomes central to understanding the moment itself.

As a result, the performance also resonated with non-Black audiences, who were drawn to the characterization through a shared recognition of the labor, care, and emotional weight carried by a hardworking mother. This sense of human connectedness is reflected in feedback I received from Drs. Andrea M. Baldwin and Evan Mitchell Schares, who individually note how the performance was welcomed across difference while remaining grounded in research and praxis. (See Teaching Reviews for more information.)

By staging this story through performance, I resist surface-level narratives often reproduced in research that isolates identity categories such as race, gender, class, or religion without attending to how they intersect. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s call for intersectional praxis, this work demonstrates how performance can hold complexity. Performance makes visible the lived realities of those who are overworked, overlooked, and underrepresented in everyday life.

This clip is performed in the Art Building Gallery Hall as a last-minute resort due to unforeseen scheduling issues on campus. I also performed this same piece in the Black Box of Villanova University, performance space at Petit Jean Performance Festival, and in a conference style setting for the National Communication Association.