Eisa Davis & Jillian Walker
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?
Eisa Davis is an award-winning actor, writer, and singer-songwriter working on stage and screen. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher, and wrote and starred in Angela’s Mixtape, and is creating a limited series based on the memoir by Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine. Eisa is a 2020 Creative Capital recipient. She was awarded the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. She has received fellowships from Sundance, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, and the Doris Duke, Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an actor, she is an Obie Award winner for Sustained Excellence in Performance. Eisa’s recent work includes a microplay by Lynn Nottage in the virtual series Theatre For One, the role of June in the musical adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees (AUDELCO award, Lortel nomination), Kings at the Public (Drama League nomination), the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, and Preludes created by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, for which she received her second Lucille Lortel nomination. Other theatre performances include Antigone in Ferguson at Yale Rep (also composer and music director), and the acclaimed Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, captured on film by Spike Lee. Current television work includes Betty, Bluff City Law, God Friended Me, Rise, Condi Rice on The Looming Tower, and Succession.
Jillian Walker is a multidimensional artist, teacher, and ancestral guide. She is the creator of the critically-acclaimed, SKiNFoLK: An American Show, (NY Times Critics Pick, Kilroys List) forthcoming from 53rd State Press, Songs of Speculation (2020 Third Coast Award), Sarah’s Salt, and the upcoming film, BLK GRK (or, hiding in plain sight). Jillian is a 2020 Lilly Award recipient and seeks to inspire the culture ever-more toward love and liberation in her time-bending in(ter)dependent publication, “The Free List.” Jillian currently lives, works and heals in New York. www.thisisjillianwalker.com
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