Eisa Davis & Jillian Walker

In September 2021, playwright/performers Eisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker’s performance ritual, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). In January 2022, they met again to discuss Davis’s installation performance piece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in 2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirror each other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generational trauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given the commodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How to acknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform without being captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?