Tschabalala Self on Her Play for Performa, ‘Sounding Board’
In the play, Self treats dialogue as a material for collage, reworking it to elicit new meanings.
Tschabalala Self. Photo: Christian DeFonte
One of the most celebrated painters of her generation set aside her brushes to create a play for New York's Performa Biennial.
Tschabalala Self's Sounding Board showed at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem this month.
In the play, characters A and B are creative types with differing needs for validation.
'The whole play hinges on this idea that between character A and B there's a conflict because they both exist on this stage—and the stage can be a metaphor for any number of things—but Character A wants to stay on the stage whereas Character B wants to leave,' Self told Ocula Magazine.
'Creatives are constantly dealing with the idea of an audience,' she continued, 'but all people, I think, in their head believe that they have an audience, and the audience is all the other people that they're interacting with.'
Characters A and B fire accusations and admonishments at one another, asking 'what do you do for me?' and warning that 'you can't live in a house that's built upon your back'.
'I'm thinking about how those two elements exist in my paintings and how I can bring them into a durational context or a performance context,' she said.
Certain lines of dialogue are repeated, taking on new meanings as the play progresses, a process Self likens to her use of repetition and collage in the studio.
The stage, which includes backdrops painted by Self and furniture based on her drawings, is also informed by her painting.
'The space is meant to reference a domestic space, but it's not meant to be a literal one. It's somewhat of a liminal space. In my paintings, I describe liminal spaces by using colour fields.'
Another commonality between her play and her paintings, Self says, is that both centre around narratives.
'I imagined some of the characters from previous works being brought to life,' she said.
At the same time, she was excited to experiment with a new art form.
'You can get at different things in different mediums,' she said.
Self's previous exhibitions include Bodega Run, which showed at Pilar Corrias, London in 2017 and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai in 2018. The exhibition celebrates the vitality of inner city corner stores.
Bodega's aren't so common in New Haven, Connecticut, where Self now lives.
'I was living in a really small town during the pandemic. That's the only place I would see any of my friends or neighbours was the supermarket. It definitely felt like the club a little bit.' —[O]
