performance

Daddy's Black and Jewish (2011)
Written and Performed by Lian Amaris
Directed by Melissa Moschitto
Nuyorican Poets Cafe

video coming soon...
	photo by lian amaris

Called "riveting" by Backstage and "beaming" by The New York Times, performance artist Lian Amaris takes on drag, soul food, and mitzvot in her 2011 monologue on sexual, racial, and religious "passing."

Raised in a Kosher Jewish household by a black father and a feminist mother, Amaris sculpts a world of hybrid identities inspired by gender-play, racial ambiguity, childhood mythologies, border crossing, and daily cultural tensions in her Crown Heights neighborhood. Melissa Moschitto, founding Artistic Director of [The Anthropologists], directs.

Amaris combines monologue, music, Brechtian storytelling, and visual language under the direction of Moschitto, to create a disturbing and charming portrait of a fragmented woman who has learned to cross any border, but cannot stay long in foreign lands. Framed as an episodic series of pop culture neuroses, Daddy's Black and Jewish explores themes of memory, gender construction, and racial tensions, in the spirit of Amaris' previous works.

Photos by Daniel Seeley

Daddy’s Black and Jewish is framed as five fragmented neuroses, which function as sites of personal obsession and inspiration. To varying degrees, these episodes are informed by my slippery articulations of gender, sexuality, hybridity, race, class, religion, devotion, fear, alienation, and civic or social responsibility. Though only a fragment of the story that makes up my (or any person’s) matrix of identity, the piece substantially invokes the title character, as his hybridity mirrors my own. It is often awkward and sometimes alienating telling people that my father is Black and Jewish, neither of which I am. People consistently make assumptions about identifiers, so my tolerance for the most seemingly-benign racist or anti-Semitic comments is tested often. Telling someone my father is Black and Jewish can either end a conversation or start one- I always hope for the latter.
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