The racialized roles we play: Owning the self through an emergent theatre project

ABSTRACT This article shares the author’s reflection upon how participation in an emergent theatre project allowed for examination into the construction and deconstruction of “self” in response to an onslaught of social directives on how to perform racialized selves—or how to be Black or White or Other. Conversations and interactions across the Emergent Theatre Project (ETP) and specifically with student participant Yusuf Agunbiade and Eric Love, the co-faculty director, serve as the backdrop for this critically self-reflective piece. In doing so, Applied Theatre is imagined as a radical and subversive space where socially imposed identities may be named, challenged, deconstructed, reconstructed, rearranged, owned, and acted upon.