Eisa Davis & Jillian Walker

In September 2021, playwright/performersEisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker's performance ritual, SKiNFoLK:An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). InJanuary 2022, they met again to discuss Davis's installation performancepiece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirroreach other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generationaltrauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given thecommodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How toacknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform withoutbeing captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?