Put Away the Fire, dear Pt. 2 - La Mama Theater
Along the portals and seams spanning reality and cinema, Put Away the Fire, dear, uproots power and history across generations of the American landscape, in the rupture of “The Master Narrative” to dismantle American Cinema of the 1930s-60s. Immersing into the worlds of 6 characters in a dance-theater live-performance film, A Black Woman contrasts her archetype of disappearance, with potent will and grit. unearthing a journey of quaking history, fantastical play of unimagined roles, unbelievable love and compassion, and a power to take back the narrative. Crossing arcs, the characters shift the lens and redirect storylines across eras of thriller, film-noir, romance, and musical, and tether it to our contemporary perspective. Using dance theater, film’s perspective, text, and sound score, they tear apart stories, disintegrate archetypes, to finally live the inaccessible range of humanness and truth (beyond white supremacy). Remixing in the coinciding histories of jazz music and cinema’s gaze, with our volition in an evening-length work. Against an inherited history of erasure as a Black American Woman from the South, I take my lens and radical dreaming as weapons of resistance, creating an immersive eye through this live film to witness time-hopping from my grandmother's perspective on the farm, to a trauma house where I imagine beyond it’s window views, to expanding onto grand stages and fantastical plots of American cinema where I’ve never existed. We boldly take the pen (create our narratives), of our most feared power, release our temper of the flame, and set fire to the structures that be to imagine new: possibility.
