Five Pieces on Black – Sharay Davis
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Amy Ratkovich started the evening with a performance that bluntly exposed and forefronted racial stereotypes as a way to make her audience confront their own conceptions and misconceptions about what Americanism is and looks like. Her act was meant to be performed as a comedy and was not pleased with the audience’s more serious response to her presentation. Amy requested to have her videos removed from the web, which we have honored, and we furthermore recognize her work by keeping her presence intact on our site. (Based on her personal request voting for Amy will not be available.)
They are Magdalena Soul, Naoko Okabe, Liesa Lietzke, Sharay Davis, and Amy Ratkovich. Each of them will bring in a five minute performance of their own to the Show Some Color video taping event this coming Tuesday, October 30. Each of them are very different, not just in terms of who they are and where they are from, but also each of their different feminine sensitivity and their languages of expression. If you think you know what is this project about, then just wait until you see their performances because I only realized that after meeting them in casting interview. And I think part of the reason is that we have heavily inserted our own preconceptions about race and identities. Profiles for each of the women are created on the Women Profile Page using their own words. Here I will give a brief introduction about everyone.
Magdalena Soul will present her version of free style hip hop dance. Magdalena is Italian-American but she said she is highly influenced by African American culture. Make sure you are ready for her unstoppable energy and stand firm on your feet when you see her dance!
Naoko Okabe is going to talk about her being a Japanese woman in America. She believes the limitation on racial understanding always exists and her in-between status of Japanese and American is something difficult to communicate with a common perception, and particularly in terms of her art practice.
Liesa Lietzke asked during the casting, what happens when the default color is asked to talk about race. Is it important to be sensitive about the issue of “race” at all times? Liesa is an artist, who use food as material. She will do a performance with food to express her “whiteness”.
Sharay Davis has a black power father who dislikes white people. And she has been perceived by her family and friends that she was not being black enough. Sharay is going to perform a spoken word piece on her racial experience with her family and and also how in some ways she has had more brushes with racism since moving to the Bay Area from Ohio.
Amy Ratkovich is a comedian. She told us that she naturally has twelve different selves. Amy is preparing a comedy set where she will appropriate stereotypes of different ethnicity groups to show their absurdities.
And who is the sixth woman? We are opening the stage to the audience during the event. From 7-8PM, audience members are invited to come and make their own five minute video with our video crew. So YOU are the sixth performer! Event Details