Aku Kadogo, chair of the Department of Theater and Performance, shared her joy and appreciation for the theater during her keynote address at the 16th biennial National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“The theater captivated me, but not in the sense of remaining confined within four walls and a proscenium arch,” said Kadogo in her keynote, “Polyrhythmic Theatre Making: Speaking in (Other) Tongues,” which focused on creating theater across language lines.
“Whether I was performing on a Broadway stage, sitting beneath the Milky Way witnessing ceremonial dance in Australia, or viewing a puppet show in a busy Indonesian intersection, I have been touched with an insatiable curiosity for those transcendent moments we define as a theater experience.”
Additionally, novelist and playwright, Pearl Cleage, C’71, received the August Wilson Playwright Award and Keith Bolden, associate professor of theater and performance, participated as well. In June, Kadogo presented her work “Salt City,” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. “Salt City” began at Spelman in 2015 as a collaboration with poet Jessica Care Moore.