rewarded us with her candor, genius and curiosity, that was at once unnerving and authentically centered.
At the early stages of my thoughts when coming into my research that would feature Shange as a case study
on Authentic Artistic Leadership, there was only a vague recognition of what exactly I was seeking in both
the writing and conveying of my ideas. While the ideas were not concretely formed, they were nonetheless
forming as initially culled from Shange’s vibrant, multilayered memoir, Lost in Language & Sound or how
I found my way to the arts (2011). What I did know was that “the artist,” as she is both marked by and
marks others with the “constructs of knowledge” that Collins investigates within the larger framework of
Black feminist “knowledge,” appeared a more complex phenomenon when the contributors and builders
are also Black, creative women. In my attempt to better understand the origins of Shange’s “leadership”
traits through the practices and stages of building her many and varied ensembles of artists, for example,
she operates from intuitive and carefully considered “blueprints” as the creative practitioner/leader who was
committed to gender advocacy, race diversity and visibility. Shange writes about the inception of the for
colored girls project as one that was part of a “multilingual women presence, new to all of us & desperately
appreciated.” Not only did her vision comprise a startling number of collaborators, but as much, she noted,
“[We] were promoting the poetry and presence of women in a legendary male-poet’s environment. This is
the energy & part of the style that nurtured for colored girls...” 3 .
In formidable ways, Shange’s originality and boldness serve as a prescient shout-out to “#BlackGirlMagic” 4
– a contemporary “movement” or “concept” premised on Black women getting about the business of loving
themselves “fiercely” while in service to community and larger societal ideals. Not only did she create room
for healing and self-care, but these ideals and intentions remain the most defining of her creative gifting.
Now all colored and Black girls know that liberation can be restorative.
Despite her self-derived artistic emergence and identification process with her peers, as the opening
statement at the start of my essay establishes, Shange remained acutely alert to the social and economic
privileges that were rarely afforded even accomplished women of color artists. She echoes as much in her
remarks on the mutually sought “essential” agendas required of herself and mainstream “institutions” to
bring to fruition for colored girls— which was destined to be only the second play by an African American
woman (after Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In the Sun), to move to the Broadway stage. Shange writes:
“Those institutions I had shunned as a poet — producers, theaters, actresses, and sets — now were
essential to us. For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf was a theater piece.
[…] With the assistance of the New York Shakespeare Festival […] we received space & a set, lights and a
mailing list, things Paula & I had done without for two years. […] Lines of folks & talk all over Black and
Latin community propelled us to the Public Theater in June. Then to the Booth Theater on Broadway in
September 1976.” 5
The production’s commercial victory culminated following more than two years of wrangling an often
unwieldy though dedicated community of “organizational citizens” in actors, dancers, musicians, poets, that
performed in bars and cafes in San Francisco and workshop productions in Manhattan’s Lower East Side,
who nevertheless remained committed to Shange’s engaged leadership strategies. While driven to “handle
her business,” her efforts were realized as a strained vision in which she was required to play multiple roles
initially, often with little administrative infrastructure and almost always surrendering to the wisdom and
impulses of her “followers,” the needs of white mainstream institutions and producers, and of her lurking
internal monsters.
Both on stage and beyond, Shange modeled in her lived theatricality what is seen as our anticipatory
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african Voices