Bull Jean And Dem Dey Back

bull-jean & dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth's southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean. First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories chronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south, the bull-jean stories is an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we needed--the raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching wo'mn-lovvn-wo'mn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her. Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations from cussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.

To an unusual degree among writers, playwrights’ creations are not simply words on a page. Instead, a well-wrought play is an intricate machine that will be used by directors, actors, designers, and other creators to bring a fully staged, real-time performance into the world. The construction and maintenance of that machine is the playwright’s job, and it requires an array of complex, interconnected skills and techniques. Enter Justin Maxwell and The Playwright’s Toolbox, a stimulating and wide-ranging resource for both beginning and experienced dramatists. It brings together invigorating, provocative, and irreverent exercises contributed by nearly 60 leading English-language playwrights, covering all stages of the writing process. It offers an accessible roadmap for those who have never written a play before, while providing new angles and solutions for seasoned writers struggling with a particular challenge. Covered here is everything fromgenerating ideas and world-building, through dialogue and plotting, to revision and the last steps before releasing a play into the world, making this an endlessly useful guide to building better plays.

In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth's bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.

"Using traditional storytelling and nontraditional verse to chronicle the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean, the bull-jean stories give cultural documentation and social commentary on African-American herstory and survival. Set in the rural South of the 1920s, the bull-jean stories herald the spirit of African-American people."--PUBLISHER.

Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

The first full-length study of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, that draws on the jazz principles of ensemble--the break, the bridge, and the blue note.

The world’s greatest spinner of Cajun tales and a leading authority on Cajun dialects combine their talents in this rollicking anthology of Cajun humor. For more than forty-five years the delight of audiences around the country, the exceptionally neighborly and friendly Justin Wilson is without peer in his mastery of the distinctive Cajun patois and the storied Cajun joie de vivre. Nattily decked out in string ties, flop-brimmed Panama hat, and flaming red suspenders, and punctuating his stories with a booming “I ga-ron-tee!” Wilson projects authentic Cajun Humor instantly recognized by anyone who has visited the Louisiana bayou country. Wilson, whose tales have been recorded on numerous bestselling albums, is also the author of More Cajun Humor, and Justin Wilson’s Cajun Fables, as well as many cookbooks, including The Justin Wilson Cookbook, The Justin Wilson Cookbook #2: Cookin’ Cajun, The Justin Wilson Gourmet andGourmand Cookbook, Justin Wilson’s Outdoor Cooking with Inside Help, all published by Pelican. Howard Jacobs, a widely read columnist with The New Orleans Times-Picayune, is the coauthor of Justin Wilson’s Cajun Humor, and author of Cajun Laugh-in.

Fiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Drama. LOVE CONJURE/BLUES is performance literature/a novel that is constructed for breath. The piece is not meant to be theater/a concert/an opera or a staged reading but is. LOVE CONJURE/BLUES places the fiction- form inside a traditional Black American voice/inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within the fit of a highly literary text filled with folktales poetry haints prophecy song and oral history. LOVE CONJURE/BLUES considers a range of possibilities of gender expression and sexuality within a southern/rural/Black working class context that examines the blues as a way of life/as ritual in concert with Ancient practices and new creations. The past the present the future the living and the dead co-exist together/at the same time in a weave of dreams/Prayers/Love/Spirit expressed."