July 5, 2023
Current Ph.D. candidate Yunina Barbour-Payne has received first prize in Black Theatre Network's S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Competition in the graduate division. Her award-winning paper is titled "Costuming for an Affrilachian Stage: The Color Purple in Crystal Wilkinson's Blackberries, Blackberries."
The Black Theatre Network established the S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Competition to celebrate and encourage scholarly work addressing aspects of Black Theatre. Prizes are awarded to papers at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Barbour-Payne's award-winning paper and research are connected with her production of More Blackberries, Please, which she presented as part of The 2023 Cohen New Works Festival. As the first prize winner, Barbour-Payne was invited to present her research at the 2023 Black Theatre Network Conference in St. Louis, Missouri on July 20-23, 2023.
Abstract for Yunina Barbour-Payne's award-winning paper, "Costuming for an Affrilachian Stage: The Color Purple in Crystal Wilkinson's Blackberries, Blackberries" -
"Crystal Wilkinson’s Blackberries, Blackberries has the choreographic opportunity of a Ntzoke Shange piece, with characters whose humanity resemble those in a Toni Morrison story. This novel turned stage adaptation presents a series of vignettes whose characters find themselves in all too familiar situations. From wives sitting across the table from their husband’s lovers to children breaking free from their single mother’s tight grip, Blackberries, Blackberries is about Black life in Appalachia through an Affrilachian lens of survival, perseverance and everyday instances of life, love and the moments after. This stage adaptation offers an artistic approach to cultural representations of Black life akin to Alice Childress. As the director, I found myself, much like the adoring position Imani Perry held in relationship to her archival recovery of Lorraine Hansberry’s life and work, a profound sense of responsibility not just to the writer but also the subjects of this piece, Black Appalachian/Affrilachian Women. In this paper, I take two texts, the novel by Affrilachian poet Crystal Wilkinson and stage adaptation of the same novel by Black Kentucky scholar Ritta Abell to educate, entertain and inform audiences of the nuanced cultural diversity of Black American life. Utilizing a Black Feminist lens garnered from the multiple texts engaged during the creative process, this paper articulates my dramaturgical and directorial approach for translating representations of Black Appalachian life onstage."
Photo by Thomas Allison from More Blackberries, Please, directed by Yunina Barbour-Payne and presented in The Cohen New Works Festival (2023).