love conjure/blues
by Sharon Bridgforth
love conjure/blues is performance literature/a novel that is constructed for breath. love conjure/blues places the fiction-form inside a traditional Black American voice/inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within the fit of a highly literary text—filled with folktales poetry haints prophecy song and oral history.
love conjure/blues considers a range of possibilities of gender expression and sexuality within a southern/rural/ Black working class context that examines the blues as a way of life/as ritual—in concert with Ancient practices and new creations. The past the present the future the living and the dead co-exist together/at the same time in a weave of dreams/Prayers/Love/Spirit expressed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Bridgforth, a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2009, is a writer working in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic. Her piece, blood pudding, was produced in the 2010 New York SummerStage Festival. She is the 2010 – 2012 Visiting Multicultural Faculty member at The Theatre School at DePaul University. 2009 Mellon Artist In-Residence in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Bridgforth is recipient of the 2008 Alpert/Hedgebrook Residency Prize. Her work has been presented around the country at venues including the Walker Art Center and La Peña Cultural Center. Bridgforth’s work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts Commissioning Program; The National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Playwright in Residence Program; National Performance Network Commissioning Fund; the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media; and the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Award. Bridgforth is the author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories, published by RedBone Press. She is co-editor of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project (University of Texas Press, 2010).
“A Revolution of Spirit” by Abe Louse Young
[Photo: © 2011 by Vanessa Vargas]
89 pp.
© 2004 by Sharon Bridgforth
Cover art: “Conjurers” © 2004 by Daniel Alexander Jones
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
ISBN-13: 978-0-9656659-6-4
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