How can bell hooks' essay on Black women's cinematic looking relations be applied to radical theatre

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From the 1920s to the present, a cadre of Black women playwrights have been making key works on themes of historical amnesia, gender, and racial exclusion. These works act as objects of resistance that relate specific cultural and socio-political concerns but are not so experimental that they are absent of meaning or lacking coherence. They depict the real in an experimental way. They demonstrate a Black feminist practice. Writers bearing this legacy are African American women like Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange and Black British Women such as Mojesola Adebayo, and debbie tucker green. This practice-based research aims to add to the discourse around these Black female experimental writers by identifying the aesthetic patterns and unique customs that exist in their work. Heretofore research done on Black women's playwriting and performance has focused largely on its content, political intention and where or how various plays reside within the theatre and its economies (Anderson 2008). But little research has critically concerned itself with surveying these works for the structural criteria that provide for a Black feminist aesthetic regardless of the styles in which they are written. This research addresses this gap and proposes itself as both a written thesis and a creative provocation to my own dramatic experimentation. In this way I will bring to bear over twenty years of my own award-winning theatre practice to the question of how a Black feminist practice can affect audience expectations of performativity that ruptures the hegemonic gaze. My intention is to interrogate my own Black Feminist voice to reach for a more radica ltheatre practice by seeing anew the fundamental conventions in my own work and others.This is important because the distinct application of Black feminist practice in theatre and performance remains largely under recognized. This area demands further study and support.