Margaret Laurena Kemp, associate professor of theatre and dance, and Julie Wyman, associate professor of cinema and digital media, have collaborated on a short experimental film, “She Who Is: The Adrienne Kennedy Fugues,” which is now being presented online by the Woman Made Gallery. 

Performed within an actual teaching theatre where typically scientists lecture on their findings, this work poses a dialogue between African-American social dance and artistic practice as an accumulated knowledge bank. The ’see-through’ Victorian Costume, worn in this work continues a creative exploration of authorship, spatial awareness, and cellular memory.

Visually inspired by classical Hollywood imagery that floods the works of American playwright Kennedy, her body of work features protagonists who are highly educated, acculturated African American academics find themselves teetering on the edge of the ‘metaphysical dilemma’ that is in the margins where both living inside and outside of the academy are squeezed. Kennedy, interrupts ‘the system’ of the well-made play with long poetic, cinematically described stage directions.