Bronx gothic

About this book

Bronx Gothic is a portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili as she stages a final tour for her one-woman show. Although the play within the play of Bronx Gothic is set in the 1980s, Okwui's piece is timely. She explains in the film that her depiction of a "vibrating brown body" is political insofar as all "black and brown bodies" have been inscribed with a history of violence in our culture. She says in the film that Americans have become "acculturated to seeing brown bodies in pain" and she hopes that "Bronx Gothic" will allow audience members to grow their empathic capacity while seeing her in a radical dance that presents the brown body from a new perspective. We follow Okwui as she tours "Bronx Gothic" around the country and conducts talkbacks with her audience. During these sessions, she interrogates both the formal elements of her show (e.g. durational performance, fragmented storytelling) and the political ramifications of her characters' actions and environment. This leads members of her audience to share emotional stories from their own lives, during some of the talk-backs.