Philip Auslander: Time flies! You first appeared in The Art Section as a poet—we published a beautiful poem of yours in 2008. Your career as an actor started to take off soon thereafter, first in theater, and also in film and television. Tell us a little about your trajectory from then till now.

 

Danielle Deadwyler: I remember that time vividly. The inception of the Obama era. I ended up not experiencing the first year fully, as I lived in Vancouver, BC temporarily. I was definitely exploring multiple mediums then, as I am now. There was a segue to theatre/film/TV due to locale (Vancouver was a major TV hub before ATL) and a missing feeling from the past few years. My focus while in school was much more academically driven. Then, I was pondering how I would manifest marrying the academic and the artistic. So thereafter, a fervor for performance grew in all forms. The above mentioned forms, with performance art following soon after. A desire to create one's own was always roiling beneath the surface. I loved performing the ideas of others in more commercial forums, but performance art enabled me to experiment with critical concepts/experiences directly affecting me. The last several years were the cascade into fusing all of the above or learning how to allow for fluid coexistence of them all.

 

PA: I like your idea of fusing different media and finding ways of working through and across them to say what you want to say. Can you say a little more about how this process of cross-pollination works for you and how we can see it in your work?

 

DD: The multimedia works come out of a need to represent what it feels like to be in multiple worlds and to work in a non-linear process. It is in effort to meet myself, the multigenerational community in which I engage, and myriad others where they are...be that in movement, film, performance, public/private, et. al. It's a stretching. And it comes in no one format. Each project calls forth its own modalities and mapping. Often one form leads, and calls back to the others to join the party.

 

PA: Does doing your own work in writing, film, performance art, and installation allow you to explore issues, questions, and characters that you might not get to explore in your screen work? 

 

DD:Oh of course. My own works/experimentations are much more personal themes, to myself, my family, lineage/ancestors, community, all black women/femmes, folks who come from spaces and terrains I have developed within or seek to go and imagine. And it manifests in all kinds of anachronistic, nonlinear modalities. I enjoy the filter of the screen and the showing of the slip in all of the other forms too.

 

PA: What are some of the themes you wish to explore and some of your own works in which you have pursued them? 

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DD: Some of the themes I engage include, but are not limited to: public/private work, race/gender/sexuality, and public performance/community dialogue; domestic and sexual work, endurance and the impacts on the black body; black women's subjectivity and Black Americana chaos.

 

PA: The cultural context of a commercial television program or film and that of a performance piece or museum exhibition seem quite different, if not far apart. How do you experience the different cultural realms in which you work and the relationships between them?

 

DD:I don't know if their wholly experienced as different. The main difference is budget. I experience them all as labs with their own argot. Parallelisms in how to achieve an intent can be discovered if we make less muddy the languages we speak, I find.

 

PA: I see what you're saying. But isn't it the case that these different forms and institutions reach different audiences? What are your thoughts on audience? Whom do you hope to reach and what do you want to say to them?

 

DD: I think they meet myriad audiences. Some audiences are surely overlapping. The initiative I practiced in my works after the Black Box Series entailed public, on the street performances because I am speaking with a specific community. The Black community. The themes I work through, the personal and historical,  come from that cultural framework, hence my first community to engage. Everyone else happens to be a witness.

 

PA: know this is a corny question, but what are a couple of the roles or projects that you are especially happy to have done?

 

DD: I'm always excited for the first one, the first of any of the mediums. There is a visceral gratefulness I have for the initial effort, the recognition for a want for more. The first performance exhibition I did was at Spelman Museum's Black Box series. There are so many things that still hold true for me from that initial opportunity, and so much transformation as well that seeped into everything that I do. For that I am full of gratitude.

 

PA: Another corny question. If a young performer were to come to you to ask for advice in developing their work and career, what would be the single most important thing you'd want do say?

 

DD: Experiment with the personal, the intimate. Play. And again and again.