https://padlet.com/katemccarthywit/y62htba726fhizn0 Ntozake Shange creates characters who are interpreted by what they say and by what their bodies do (Mahurin 2013). Post your responses to this statement here. Your should reference both the primary and performance texts. en-us 2020-09-29 11:02:08 UTC 2025-10-21 01:51:52 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet.net/icons/png/1f4a1.png https://padlet.com/katemccarthywit/y62htba726fhizn0/wish/2524254696 From reading the text to watching the performance of Shange the use of the body can be seen in two ways. From what I understood from reading the text is that these female characters were talking about themselves in third person. But there was enough description in the text to imagine how these characters moved about. From watching the performance it was almost as I can see the text right in front of me but this time I could put a face to the characters. There were moments in text and the performance that I could tell what these characters were around each other. When the female characters were all put in one room they seemed at ease. They were free. They felt like they could to anything they wanted. There was that confidence amongst all of them that an be interpreted both in text and performance. That idea of confidence could be tied to moments in which these women were able to portray their body as this vessel that would attract men. When the lady in red goes on to tell a story about there's this girl who dresses up every night just to go out and attract men. She made it become a regular thing for her, to bring the men home, sleep with them, and leaves in the morning. And although it raised questions as to whether it was right or wrong to do that, she felt she had the power to do whatever she wanted. But as each of her encounter ends she just goes back to a woman and reality hits her again. This is just one of the many examples of how these women were able to portray their bodies that can be seen as both sexual both also as a source of power.
-Janice.

References
Shange, N (2010) For Coloured Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.]]> 2023-03-20 20:51:10 UTC https://padlet.com/katemccarthywit/y62htba726fhizn0/wish/2524254696 https://padlet.com/katemccarthywit/y62htba726fhizn0/wish/2524344516 After watching the performance of "coloured girl's who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf" and after reading the text. I came to realize that it is a story about young black women in the USA in the 1960s and early 1970s trying to come to terms with what it meant and means to be a young black woman during these time, the late 1960s and early 1970s where time of unprecedented changes in the U.S and the world for that matter. martin Luther king and the civil rights movement, the war in Veitnam, the cold war and the moon landing.  in may ways i feel like these decades mirror our own times in the past five years. a Global pandemic, the BLM protests around the world, and of course The war in Ukraine, and the start of a new cold war, a  incoming eccomic crisis. 
so how does this relate to the text or film well, in the film the narrator uses her body in dance to try and liberate herself from the shackles of what being black in the U.S tell her how to behave, but she questions and rebels against this through her words and songs and dance, and also through her actions, yet every time she does it seems like the past and present are holding her back from reaching these goals. 
Shange's text and filmed Performance reminded me a small bit about myself, yes i know i am not a person of colour nor a woman. but i am half German and half Irish, (my mother is German my father is Irish) and we all know what the Germans did in the past, and this past is something which still chases after Germans to this day. and something i had to deal with through out my childhood, ignorant questions oh did you know Hitler " why yes, he was my grandfather"(NO HE WAS NOT) so as i got older i came to the conclusion, that in Ireland i will be see as a German and in Germany i will be seen as an Irish man. so this probably is, why i fell in love with Drama and theatre as it gives me a way of exploring my own identity. so i suppose what i am trying to say that as a child i struggled with my own identity a bit like shange's does in her text, but her struggles were much worse then my own search for identity. ]]> 2023-03-20 23:02:15 UTC https://padlet.com/katemccarthywit/y62htba726fhizn0/wish/2524344516