“Romans, Countrywomxn, Lovers”: How a Production of Julius Caesar Needed Black Feminism to Rebuild Rome
In January 2018, a group of womxn-, femme-, and non-binary-identifying actors got together at Brown University’s Production Workshop and started rehearsing William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Such gender-bending adaptations had happened before, but despite the precedent, it was still a somewhat controversial move. Of all of Shakespeare’s traditionally white plays, Caesar is in many ways also the most traditionally male. However, our cast aimed to disrupt those and other assumptions, finding the tenderness, intimacy, and love in our re-imagining of Rome.
As director, I realized that if I wanted Caesar to be the radical theatrical space I believe in — one where theater is community-building, community-sustaining, and transformative — I needed to find a theatrical practice attending to identities that I do not hold. As a cis white woman, I am privileged, on my college campus and certainly beyond. In the early moments of the Julius Caesar process, I began to ask: as a director, how can I recognize the ways my identities are located within systems of oppression and power, and facilitate a theatrical practice that resists those hierarchies?
To answer this question and build this practice, theories, educational pedagogies, and ethnographies of Black Feminism are not just useful — they’re key.
1. Color-conscious casting, not color-blind casting.
While “color-blind” casting is a popular practice (see Noma Dumezweni as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Hermione and J.K. Rowling’s positive-but-passive response), it doesn’t attend to the way race, specifically blackness, is a site of oppression and not just of “difference.”
As Brandi Wilkins Catanese writes in The Problem of the Color[blind], color-blind casting is not radical or transformative. More often it ends up being a kind of whitewashing, where Black actors are “allowed” to play white roles.
In Caesar, color-consciousness meant thinking of how race could affect dynamics between characters, or at least, the way audiences might read those dynamics. It meant discussing this at length in the rehearsal room, to find productive and creative ways that the identities of actors were not erased, but rather incorporated and celebrated.
2. Attend to intersectionality in all things
My first attempt to rebuild Caesar’s Rome was almost exclusively questioning gender through feminism, but, as Kimberlé Crenshaw and countless other Black Feminist thinkers point out, mainstream feminist analysis is usually white feminism. Non-intersectional feminism is dangerous, flattening and grossly incomplete.
In invoking and involving analyses of race, class, and sexuality in our discussion as well, we could challenge essentialist generalizations of what “womxnhood” even is, and begin building an intersectional Rome.
3. Dialogue onstage and off
bell hooks expands on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to envision classroom spaces that resist traditional teacher/student hierarchies and divides, mostly through dialogue.
Central to deconstructing power dynamics between director and actors is the same dialogic practice, where all voices are heard, valued, and used in decision-making and, in this case, world-building.
Every Caesar rehearsal involved lengthy conversation. We wrote notes, themes, and affirmations on large pieces of paper that lined the room, and eventually put them up in a small museum. By providing sticky notes and markers, we extended the practice of dialogue to our audiences.
4. Integrating theory and praxis for practice
“Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.” (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress 61).
The Caesar company talked on how not to separate “process” from “product,” but think on the whole as a practice. This is theory and praxis in consummation.
5. Don’t transcend, transgress.
Whereas the goal to “transcend” difference can be seen in color-blind casting, white feminism, and other similarly anodyne “activism,” transgression is what bell hooks, Brandi Wilkins Catanese, and countless others are truly calling us to.
Transcendence is a form of non-engagement. Transgression is an informed and energetic violation of boundaries which deserve to be violated. Transcendence doesn’t make people uncomfortable, but transgression can do real harm to the policed categories it challenges.
In the practice envisioned here, theories and strategies from Black Feminisms make room for a theater company to be brave and take care.
This is a practice of reclamation; it rejects disdain and competition and requires radical commitment, energy, and play. This is a practice where dialogue is at the core, authority is shared, and everyone is a member of the company.
~Photography by Alex Hanesworth~
References and Further Readings
Catanese, Brandi Wilkins. The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. Theater: Theory, Text, Performance. Ann Arbor, UNITED STATES: University of Michigan Press, 2011. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=3415104.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In The Black Feminist Reader, edited by Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 208–38. Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Khomami, Nadia. “JK Rowling ‘loves Black Hermione’ Casting of Noma Dumezweni.” The Guardian, December 21, 2015, sec. Stage. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/21/jk-rowling-loves-black-hermione-casting-noma-dumezweni.
