Scripts, newspaper articles and research, CDs, DVDs, and ephemera pertaining to Glenda Dickerson's project for "Transforming thru Performing: re/placing Black womanly images." "…the original goal of The Project was to enter the Black woman's performing voice into the scholarly discourse surrounding gendered identity. Towards that end, we began a series of performance dialogues called "Kitchen Prayers". After 9/11, "Kitchen Prayers" revolved around stories which spoke to the impact of war and terror on women around the world…" (from the exhibit listing in Deep Blue)
Glenda Dickerson (February 9, 1945 – January 12, 2012) was an iconic director, folklorist, adaptor, writer, choreographer, actor, black theatre organizer, and educator; known throughout American theater as a promoter of a "womanist" direction in the theater, her work focused on folklore, myths, black legends, and classical works reinterpreted. At the University of Michigan Dickerson was Head of the African American Theater Minor and served as Director of the Center for World Performance Studies. -- (en.wikipedia.org, retrieved Sept. 12, 2019)
Glenda Dickerson's career spanned a little over forty years. She held roles within the field of American/Black/Feminist theatre. Dickerson was the second African American woman to direct on Broadway with the 1980 production, Reggae, a Musical Revelation. After a successful run in commercial theatre. She chose to place her efforts in developing works more intended for academic and community-oriented theatre. Dickerson's career in theatre was quite distinctive. She challenged racial and gendered boundaries within both professional and academic theatre, and with her pioneering of contemporary Black theatre as well as a Black feminist theatre. Before her untimely death, Dickerson initiated The Project forTransforming thru Performance: Re/placing Black Womanly Images at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Project, subsequently subtitled Kitchen Prayer Series, was a symposium centered on a trilogy of performances responding to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Created as a "dramatized presentation of actual words of women, accumulated from contemporaneous sources such as newspapers, magazines, broadcast media and other sources from across the world," these performances presented a diverse array of women's "memories, feelings and views" on the turbulent nature of violence and war. The three performance pieces include: Performance Dialog on 9/11 and Global Loss (2002), Identities on Trial: A Kitchen Protest Prayer (2003), and Sapphire's New Shoe: The Kitchen Table Summit (2004). By highlighting major themes found within these works and providing both a historical and theoretical study of her writing, devising, and staged performances, this project aims to situate Dickerson as a forerunner of contemporary Black theatre as well as contemporary Black feminist theatre through a critical examination of the Kitchen Prayers Series.