From the womb to young adulthood — that’s how far the girl in Bria Saulsberry’s choreopoem will dance. She’ll learn, she’ll make mistakes, she’ll become herself. “It’s a celebration of Black girlhood,” Saulsberry says of the work titled Dance, Girl!
Produced by Homegrown Arts, of which Saulsberry is executive director, Dance, Girl! will feature ballet choreography and a screening of home videos and B-roll, coinciding with a reading of Saulsberry’s poetry, a collection written initially as a chapbook over the course of a decade. “I’m a poet, and that’s how I express myself,” she says, “that’s how I make sense of my world and my lived experience. It was really through collaboration with [the women of] Homegrown Arts — Jasmine Settles [artistic director] and Akina Morrow [managing director] — that we saw that there was another way that we can bring these poems to life.
“As a poet and a writer, and really as a playwright, finding a unique way to tell stories has always been a goal,” she continues. “Ntozake Shange, she’s really a big inspiration. She’s the woman who wrote For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. And that work is a choreopoem. And so digging into the roots of Black performance arts, we really wanted to uplift a form that a lot of people don’t really know about, like choreopoem [which combines poetry with dance, music, and song].”
This choreopoem will be Homegrown Arts’ second production after its founding in 2019. Since then, though, they have acquired the chapter for the Memphis Youth Poet Laureate Program, naming Ana Hunter of Hutchison School as the first honoree last summer. “We’ll be naming the new Youth Poet Laureate next summer, and we’re really excited about that as well,” Saulsberry says, “but we really want to see how far Dance, Girl! can go. I do plan for us to find different ways to tour this particular show. I want to see it on different stages.”
In the meantime, Memphis can look forward to performances on Friday and Saturday at the Evergreen Theatre. “I really hope [audiences] feel inspired,” Saulsberry says. “I hope that they want to understand the story and really, after experiencing this, they feel good, that they have left maybe thinking deeply about some of the themes that I brought up in the story. Maybe they have more conversations with their families. I’m really hoping that the women in the audience, specifically Black women in the audience, perhaps they see themselves in some of the poems or some of the experiences that this young girl navigates. And I just hope that they leave proud of what they’ve seen and feel good about what they just experienced.”
Tickets can be purchased at 901homegrown.com.
Dance, Girl! a testament to black girlhood, Evergreen Theatre, 1705 Poplar, Friday, July 12, 7 p.m. | Saturday, July 13, 7 p.m., $25.
