Two Conversations

In September 2021, playwright/performers

Eisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker's performance ritual, SKiNFoLK:

An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). In

January 2022, they met again to discuss Davis's installation performance

piece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in

2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirror

each other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generational

trauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given the

commodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How to

acknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform without

being captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?