NEW WORK IN PROGRESS:

Ancestral Body

Performance from March 2020, Brooklyn, NY (Photo by Pablo Werner)

What is my ancestral body? I’m tapping into personal and collective memory to transform this fleshy vessel into its ultimate version—an autonomous ancestral indigenous matriarchal African body.
What is my ancestral body? I am defining her by moving.

I want to understand her authentic self, free from white gazes and neocolonial rules. I must learn how an ancestral body thrives fully in an Occidental present and projects itself into an Afro-future.

Liberian women rice farming (From The New York Public Library, 1906)

(from The New York Public Library, 1906)

A Kru woman (From the New York Public Library, 1906)

(from The New York Public Library, 1906)

[Fee support for Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald may be available to nonprofit organizations through the New England States Touring (NEST) program of the New England Foundation for the Arts. Visit www.nefa.org for more information.]