Black Voices: This is Black: Macadie Amoroso

Posted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2019-10-05 02:53Z by Steven

Black Voices: This is Black: Macadie Amoroso

Shades of Noir
2019-09-02

Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark, Junior Editor

Portrait of Macadie Amoroso. Photo credit: Hâle Denholm)
Macadie Amoroso

SHADES OF NOIR Q&A – ‘Blue Beneath My Skin’

Macadie Amoroso: I am the writer and performer of ‘Blue Beneath My Skin’, which I was inspired to write because I’d been wanting, for a while, to voice my personal experiences of being mixed-race. I rarely see or hear of any plays about it, but whenever I speak to other mixed-race people, they always have so much to say about their experiences.

What motivated me to put pen to paper was receiving an email about the festival, This Is Black. It was emphasised in the email that the festival was about celebrating black work and giving black artists a voice, and I immediately felt disheartened. Not because I felt like this wasn’t important (it very much is) but because I don’t identify as black, and therefore, I felt an element of fraud/guilt, thinking, ‘this isn’t for me. Maybe I’ll be taking up space of someone who does identify as black’. This spurred me to write about what it’s like being of mixed heritage, but only having exposure to one side of that. I chose to write it in spoken word because I’ve always been more of a poet than a writer and I think it’s a very effective way of storytelling…

Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark: How did you go about building a varied depiction of Black stories and black characters?

MA: I could only build what I know, so I focused on the protagonist’s mixed-race experience, but making sure to highlight through other characters, like her best mate, Paul, that her experience is definitely not the only mixed-race experience out there. I hope what I’ve done through this play and the characters within it, is show that struggle is universal and feeling ‘blue’ is something that everyone experiences regardless of age, gender, sexuality, colour, ethnicity; it’s a part of the wider human experience…

Read the entire interview here.

Tags: , ,